2023 was a year of unexpected changes for me. After securing a prestigious 2.5 M Eur 5-year long grant in a very cool new area of work, which I wrote and was supposed to coordinate, but it got repossessed, I had to make difficult decisions. Did I have to brace and accept to work in an environment where academic ethics is not respected? Did I have to support others taking credit for achievements they did not lead on?

I decided I needed a change, and this brought me back to Scotland. It took a while to start turning the “activity wheel” again in the new environment, and here I am, reemerging from a dark place as ‘digesting’ what happened before the move was not an easy task.

But here I am, ready to start sharing new and exciting stories. What you can expect me to blog about at this point is a mixture of several topics:

• building a set of activities jointly with colleagues in Scotland and Zambia aimed at improving the digital skills in the records management sectors;
• decolonisation of GLAM institutions and the connection this has to the decolonising academic curricula;
• building and sustaining communities of practice;
• empowering the innovation units – the so-called GLAM Labs (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) with a better understanding of the sustainability of software developed within datafication efforts,
• and others, such as musings about my experience of teaching.

I guess we experience challenging situations and difficult choices not to really test if this will kill us or make us stronger. I totally do not feel stronger but I feel such situations are a challenge to exploring who we really are and what we stand for. Many thanks to those who challenged me and to those who nurtured me – I am ever so grateful to enjoy human support.

The views in this blog are my personal ones.