Library Staff Papers and Publications

This article provides the perspective of seven undergraduate students who attended the Technical University of British Columbia (1999-2002) when it was located within the Surrey Place Mall. They recall why they chose TechBC, what it was like to go to school in Whalley, the university's culture, and the academic program. They describe their experience when the school was under threat after the government changed in 2001, and their feelings when it was absorbed by Simon Fraser University in 2002. These excerpts were curated from the larger oral history collection, the TechBC Memory Project (http://digital.lib.sfu.ca/techbc-collection).

Library technician positions have been changing in recent years, yet the literature focuses on staffing reference desks and cataloguing positions. While this is an important part of an academic library technician role, technicians are equally equipped to do “more” within their institutions. The Learning and Instructional Services Division at the WAC Bennett branch of SFU Library has three Library Assistant positions filled with library technician graduates. A major part of these roles is facilitating undergraduate workshops.

In this session we will share personal experiences with both the logistics and teaching of these workshops, highlighting the collaborative relationship we have with our Teaching and Learning Librarian.

The general instruction program at SFU Burnaby includes teaching IB, FIC, FAL, and lower level SFU academic courses. This program is lead by the Head of Learning and Instructional Services, and the Teaching and Learning Librarian. Three library assistants (all with library technician diploma's) assist in the logistics of the program, and faciliate anywhere between 10 and 20 workshops a semester. 

This report documents the program "Keeping it ReAL (Research in Academic Libraries) 2017: From Ideas to Action" that was held at UBC on November 3, 2017. This event is the second annual iteration of Keeping it ReAL,  a free workshop for academic librarians in British Columbia with the aim of fostering a research culture and creating an open and supportive network for learning, sharing and supporting research among academic librarians in BC. The purpose of the program was to enhance academic librarians' skills in planning and conducting research and to foster research culture among practitioners. Sessions were held on allocating time for research, committee work as action research, librarian partnerships on systematic reviews, and writing research proposals. Participants also had the opportunity to interact with librarians and LIS researchers who have experience in specific theories and methodologies. Feedback on the workshop was positive; librarians found the structure of the day effective and appreciated the networking aspect of the event. The report outlines recommendations for continued funding, plans for future programs, and distribution.

Access to government information varies widely and is, in many cases, changing rapidly. This presentation provided an overview of the American and Canadian government information contexts as well as what each context means for contemporary library services. The question of how can librarians and information professionals of all types can meet new challenges in this area while also preparing for — and anticipating — future developments was discussed

One purpose of using digital humanities applications is to spark new insights to textual data. This presentation explores whether DH tools can help STEM librarians better understand the research interests of their faculty. Since department web pages often provide limited and dated information regarding faculty research output, and faculty rarely approach librarians for research assistance, additional approaches to raise awareness are required. I will detail the results of running Web of Science citation records from SFU’s Faculty of Applied Sciences departments through two commonly used DH applications, Mallet and Voyant Tools. I will examine this practice as a "Big Data" approach to research faculty output and Franco Moretti's "Distant Reading" theories of corpus analysis. What are the uses and limits of these tools in liaison work, particularly when a librarian lacks subject expertise in STEM disciplines?

In 2015, McGill University Library undertook a project to investigate, propose, and pilot test a method for evaluating the quality and outcomes of reference consultations. The goal of the project was to gather evidence to demonstrate the importance of reference consultations as part of librarians’ core contributions to the university. The evaluation tool was developed based on input from librarians, users, and a review of the literature. The evaluation was sent out to 98 users during the pilot test period. There were 53 responses to the evaluation tool for a response rate of 54%. Though preliminary, the results of the pilot test can be helpful in determining the usefulness of evaluating reference consultations, and the outcomes of engaging in assessment of this core library service. The results from this project suggest that implementing a tool to evaluate consultations can be used to inform services and to demonstrate the value of the library for research, teaching, and learning.

A lightening talk presentation for WILU 2016 looking at the role of library technicians in library instruction.

Texture is a WYSIWYG editor app that allows users to turn raw content into structured content, and add as much semantic information as needed for the production of scientific publications. Texture is open source software built on top of Substance (http://substance.io), an advanced Javascript content authoring library. While the Substance library is format agnostic, the Texture editor uses JATS XML as a native exchange format. The Substance library that Texture is built on already supports real-time collaborative authoring, and the easy-to-use WYSIWYG interface would make Texture an attractive alternative to Google Docs. For some editors, the interface could be toggled to more closely resemble a professional XML suite, allowing a user to pop out a raw attribute editor for any given element. Textureauthored documents could then be brought into the journal management system directly, skipping the conversion step, and move straight into a document-centric publishing workflow.