How do students with diverse gender identities experience and perceive the academic library? What can we learn from our students to help develop services, spaces and collections that support their safety and well-being? This presentation will highlight results from a qualitative case study at an academic library by exploring themes related to the students’ experiences with library workers, the library’s physical environment and its collections. The study results position the library as both a source of positive, transformational potential and site of harm and oppression. Students reported experiencing great discomfort while using library bathrooms and study spaces and were distressed by encountering library materials expressing outdated, inaccurate information about gender identity/sexual diversity. They described affirming experiences with library workers while being confronted with library technology – e.g. computers – which deadnamed them. And they questioned why libraries provide platforms to transphobic speakers in the name of intellectual freedom and highlighted the dangers of espousing neutrality. While themes surfaced by this study reflect the participants’ individual lived experiences, they are broadly reflected in survey results, scholarly literature and other works documenting these topics. Finally, this presentation will describe students’ suggestions for how academic libraries can become safer and more inclusive.

Discover the advantages of collaborating with other campus partners to develop, promote, and deliver a unique non-credit interactive information skills workshop series. Learn the importance of flexibility interactivity and modularity to the success of a non-credit information skills program. Learn how to incorporate the knowledge management practices of Learning Before, Learning During, and Learning After into team project activities.

This lightning talk presents the results of an exploratory study of the database holdings of an aspirant group of ten AACSB/Equis accredited Canadian business schools with doctoral programs. Who had the most databases? What were the most widely held titles? What does a gap analysis reveal about how Brock University fares against this aspirant group?

Presentation material for session presented at 2020 Access Conference for session entitled Selling Infrastructure as a Service to faculty. Abstract: Libraries aim to provide tools and platforms to support the research enterprise of the institution. This session will look at how a Docker based IAAS service was branded and marketed to researchers. The real challenge was communicating what could be done with the service in a way that avoided jargon and was accessible to introductory users.

A poster presented at the 2013 SLA Annual Conference, Business & Finance Division poster session, June 10, 2013 in San Diego, CA.

Collaborative Futures (CF), a project to implement a shared library system for 14 Ontario universities, is about radical collaboration. The CF Shared Resources Working Group will discuss dreaming big to create, sell, and implement a vision of long and liberal loan policies, minimal fines, and easy cross-consortium borrowing.

Open access - the practice of freely sharing scholarly outputs online -- is steadily garnering support across the research community. At academic institutions, libraries are usually the standard-bearers for this trend, advancing open scholarship by providing services, infrastructure and funding - for example, employing scholarly communication experts, operating institutional repositories, and funding open access publication costs. This investment in personnel and resources reflects a shared priority of advancing more equitable systems for creating and sharing knowledge. Our professional organizations publicly espouse these values and engage in advocacy to advance open access projects and uptake. At an institutional level, library workers often lead the development of campus open access policies which encourage or commit researchers to publicly share their work. In Canada, nine academic institutions and ten libraries/librarian councils have adopted open access policies. Despite this wealth of activity and public professions of support for open scholarship, it is unclear whether academic librarians in Canada actually practice what we preach. Most of the open access statements/policies adopted by libraries merely encourage workers to make their scholarship freely available. Anecdotal evidence indicates a minority of us are actually archiving our work in institutional repositories or publishing in open access journals. This paper will provide preliminary results from a survey exploring how Canadian academic librarians’ professional, personal and collective values impact our publishing practices. In particular, results from this study will indicate how academic freedom provisions -- articulated in collective agreements, institutional policies and by professional organizations including CAPAL and CAUT -- may affect whether we choose to support open access with our words and actions. Academic freedom is usually appreciated as a protective measure, guarding librarians and faculty against repercussions for work or speech which may be viewed as controversial. Independently choosing how to disseminate research is often a key tenet of academic freedom policies. Accordingly, librarians may experience tension between our personal/professional support for the principle of open access and our will to exert academic freedom and publish where we please – including closed-access venues. This discordance not only affects our own scholarly practices but should also be acknowledged within librarians’ continuing efforts to encourage faculty to embrace open access.

Presentation material from Lightning Talk done at Digital Odyssey, 2019. Held in North York Central Library. Event sponsored and organized by Ontario Library and Information Technology (OLITA), a division of Ontario Library Association (OLA)

Academic Freedom is a foundational component of the modern University. The notion is brought to life and exercised through a very particular article of the collective agreement. This article almost always provides a well honed, lofty, and almost self-evident description of the protections to teaching, and research that need to be maintained. Challenging ideas in the classroom are shielded from the reluctant hang wringing of administrators. Research that pushes boundaries and challenges norms proceeds with a slow march for the betterment of all. Our traditional Faculty colleagues conduct their business with full confidence that their activities are well protected, yet what about us as Professional Librarians? In most cases we can rely on this same exact article to afford protections. This is of course due to the fact that we are in the same bargaining units as those traditional Faculty members and are bound to the language as well. Yet, when pressed, does this language really offer protections to Professional Librarians that are specific to the work they conduct? A judicious application of teaching and research for the traditional Faculty member is hard to parallel with certain core Librarian duties. Where does collection development fit? Collaborating on an in-depth research consultation that might unearth ideas contrary to what the institution holds as fundamental? In some cases the collective agreement is silent on these activities. While most would view these types of conduct allowable under the spirit of academic freedom it is possible that a strict interpretation would exclude these endeavours from established protections. Fortunately this is not always the case, and as time progresses breaks to this trend develop. A selection of collective agreements of Canadian universities now have specific provisions for the conduct of Professional Librarians under the overarching concept of Academic Freedom. This paper will attempt to present this landscape by examining text from collective agreements of Canadian institutions to see how (if at all) protections for Librarians are constructed.

As champions of creating more equitable systems for sharing scholarly research, libraries are typically the leaders in developing open access policies at their institutions. This work aligns with evidence that effective policies can accelerate researchers’ adoption of open access and increase their rates of open access publishing/archiving. The benefits of Institutional open access policies include increasing public access to taxpayer-funded research, enhancing the visibility and impact of an institution’s research output and supporting author rights. While increasing numbers of institutions are adopting these policies, they are often a tough sell due to misconceptions about open access and concerns about infringing on faculty's academic freedom to publish where they please. Presenters and participants will discuss strategies for working with stakeholders to overcome barriers and create buy-in for openly sharing research. Participants will learn of models and tools for open access policy development and presenters will share insights and campus engagement strategies from their development of institutional open access policies at York University and Brock University.