BC Library Conference 2018

Weaving together insights from her experiences as a queer, mixed race, Muslim feminist, Amal's talk will explore how we can collectively create deeply transformative change and build solidarity with each other to not just survive but also find new ways to thrive in increasingly challenging times.

Amal Rana is a queer, mixed race, Pakistani Performance Poet, Educator and Muslim futurist who weaves together community narratives across cultures, languages and generations.

She has been awarded residencies with VONA Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation and the Banff Centre Literary Arts Centre. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Adrienne: A Poetry Journal Of Queer Women, Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices, Your Voice Tastes Like Home: Immigrant Women Write and online on platforms such as The Feminist Wire and Love Inshallah.

Amal has given talks and performed poetry in various cities, from New York and Toronto to Porto Alegre and Cape Town. In a time when even exhaling while being Muslim seems to have become a crime, she sees poetry as a catalyst for collective liberation.

Amal has been instrumental in the creation of numerous educational and arts based spaces for marginalized communities. In recent years, she co-founded and facilitated Telling It Bent, the first free queer and trans youth writing workshop series in Vancouver and Breaking the Fast, an annual performance art series featuring LGBTQ Muslim artists and Muslim women. Other collaborative projects of love include a series of creative writing workshops on future building for racialized communities and poetry/contemporary dance workshops for migrant youth. Amal also designs and delivers anti-oppression and Islamophobia awareness workshops for unions, faith organizations and other groups through Cambium Arts & Education.

She is a coordinating collective member of the Interfaith Institute for Justice, Peace and Social Movements. Recently the collective has launched a campaign focusing on making public spaces such as libraries and cafes temporary safe zones for Muslims, Immigrants, Refugees and others facing public harassment.

Find out more at cambiumarts.com

In a time when workloads have never seemed heavier and resources more scarce, many of us feel overworked, under-appreciated, and frustrated. One approach in achieving better work-life balance is becoming empowered through knowledge about the policies, collective agreements, and processes that shape our work. In this hands-on workshop, attendees will have the opportunity to explore the scope of their rights in their workplaces as members (or prospective members) of collective bargaining agents (unions). To gain a deeper, practical understanding of their own workplace context, participants are encouraged to bring a print or digital copy of their own union’s collective agreement. Possible topics to explore include: free speech in the workplace and beyond; code of conduct policies; workload and overtime; access to professional development; performance reviews; job descriptions; and discipline and termination.

Development of digital libraries by academic libraries and archives has provided the opportunity to increase access and use of unique content for researchers and educators connected to the institution. As the mission of academic libraries is to support the teaching, learning and research activities of the academic community, namely faculty and students of the institution, so too is the focus when developing digital libraries (DLs). However, as libraries digitize and curate collections of cultural relevance and make them openly accessible, the potential user communities reach beyond the institutionally mandated communities (Maron & Pickle, 2013)(Ochoa et. al. 2014). This distribution of user groups and use cases for the collections make decisions about content, resource development, and system infrastructures more diverse calling for future development of digital libraries to incorporate a wider array of user perspectives to remain relevant (Menzie & Birrell 2012) (Mills 2015). With the call for national and international approaches to digitization and access to cultural materials, increasing the use of digital collections in learning environment at all levels, and current outreach practices in academic digital libraries to support the use of collections in public libraries, schools, and museums, there is a need for engagement and assessment of educators, as a core user group of digital libraries created by academic institutions (Tanner and Deegan, 2011, 10).

This session will report on a UBC Library study of BC social science teachers uses, pedagogical approaches, and barriers to incorporating primary sources from DLs with a specific focus on those developed by academic institutions. Using survey, information retrieval-based exercise (simulated work-task scenario) and interview data, this session will highlight some of the key opportunities and barriers in designing student experiences with digital primary sources and selecting and web-based educational tools for this external community and how it will impact DL system design.

The community-led library model has centered public service and community consultation at the heart of librarianship, and those working face-to-face with our communities link their work to the values and culture of libraries. But how is technical services fitting in? The back end functions that comprise the infrastructure of the library are often invisible, poorly understood, and their capacity poorly correlated to service. How do we build a stronger dialogue across the library and beyond? Can technical services be community-led? Let us discuss how to bring these 'back end' services to the forefront within our institutions, and how best to communicate the effect and value to the public of what we do behind the scenes.
This session will facilitate a conversation about how we might better collaborate and communicate between the front-facing and the 'back of house'. Drawing on a cross-institutional panel of presenters at all stages of career, we’ll explore how technical services departments are being shaped today to best collaborate and communicate within -- and for -- our organizations, our communities.

Generously Sponsored By: SFU Library

Despite a variety of backgrounds, interests, job descriptions, and daily work activity, research is at the core of librarianship. From the traditional negotiation of a reference question, to the informal environmental scan, to literature reviews, and more - librarians are participants in the research process. However, when it comes to conducting primary research for publication, the environment becomes varied. Structures of an organization, collective agreements, job descriptions and appointments all impact research activity. Discussion will address questions such as: How do librarians pursue an interest in research and a professional calling to contribute to scholarly discussion while simultaneously meet the daily requirements of their job? If research is a requirement of the job, how might that change the way librarians relate to research? How can organizations create and foster a research culture? Why does research search seem to be the exclusive domain of academic librarians with continuing appointments? Panelists will also briefly share their current research with the audience and provide insight into how to conduct research at work and why such activity is important.

Definitions of, approaches to, and attention given to organizational culture is exceptionally varied and different throughout our workplaces. It is a term that can be bandied about without thought and reflection. However, organizational culture significantly impacts our work relationships, values, and our professions as a whole. Panelists will discuss what we actually mean when we say organizational culture, examine some of the critical approaches for understanding, changing, and engaging with organizational culture, and suggest how organizations can build and sustain a respectful and inclusive organizational culture.

Generously Sponsored By: United Library Services

Although the dawn of the digital era has prompted some to argue that the cultural significance of libraries has diminished considerably, we argue that libraries have a much greater role than ever to play in our continued cultural well-being. The need for information literacy, one of the core missions of all libraries, has certainly only increased in recent years. This is evidenced by the various efforts to promote the numerous emerging literacies, from digital literacy, through data literacy, to news literacy.

All of these arguably differing skillsets have one essential component in common, namely, a heavy reliance on the development of critical thinking. As libraries are expanding beyond just physical repositories of books and transitioning into a learning commons, the role of the library in enabling inquiry-based learner-centered competencies is also becoming more prominent. One core learner-centered competency is the ability to gather, analyze, and evaluate information, which is a key component in all the above stated literacies, and which is directly influenced by the ability to think critically.

One socially dis-empowering obstacle in the information age is the inability to successfully navigate the abundance of available data. Information literacy, thus, has become an integral and inseparable part of meaningfully participating in our information-driven society. In order to politically, culturally, and socially empower future generations, children need to develop critical thinking skills central to the ability to successfully navigate and evaluate information from an early age.

We propose an inquiry-based and learner-centered program for children as an alternative to the traditional storytelling programming in libraries, which utilizes picture books in a dynamic facilitated discussion session designed to hone critical thinking and information literacy skills. This session will provide explanations of the program and the benefits it provides to future library users; examples of resources will also be offered.

Library workers are inherent champions for democracy, equity, diversity, access to information and literacy. What skills do library workers bring when they volunteer in their communities? How do skills developed in their unions help in their library work? How does the emergence of precarious work impact the ability of library workers to participate in their communities? What impact would staffless libraries have on our patrons, professions and services? How can we strengthen the understanding in our communities the value of library workers as natural champions for democracy?

A panel of CUPE members will address these questions and more as we learn about their experiences as advocates for their community organizations. The short panel discussion will be followed up by an interactive dialogue by session participants to find out what interesting work our colleagues do in their communities as well as what we can do to advocate for things we value most.

Idea management is a strategy used in countless industries, but rarely in libraries, though our literature constantly challenges us to innovate. Without idea management, ideas can be incomplete, off-target, or disappear into the ether, only to return written up as a successful implementation by a DIFFERENT library. As our frontline staff shift from our item-focused history to a customer centered culture, now is the ideal time to harness their insights and put them to work for the whole organization. Share lessons learned from two libraries in different stages of adopting or sustaining idea management in public libraries.

Almost one quarter of adults listen to podcasts regularly, and this number is steadily climbing. Wondering what this means for your patrons and your services? Come to this panel to hear a variety of perspectives that will help you explore this growing medium on a deeper level. From how libraries can support content creators to ground-breaking research on new media scholarship, this panel has something for everybody!

Join three Library Directors who have moved in to new libraries in new roles. The new directors will talk about their first months in their new environments. They will share their journey toward understanding the work and culture of their institutions and talk about how they will contribute to the ongoing evolution of their organization’s culture. If you don’t think your organization has a culture, or if you think that all libraries have the same culture, this will be an eye-opening and fascinating discussion to be part of.

Library workflows are institutionalized operations, through which many services to library users are realized. But how much do our workflows advantage some and disadvantage others? When evaluating library services, do we consider how workflows might reflect institutional bias? Through the practical concept of workflows, this session seeks to make addressing institutional bias less overwhelming and necessarily humanizing.

The session will feature speakers with experience in enduring the messiness of addressing institutional bias. In sharing about their successes and failures in critiquing and changing library workflows, they hope to inspire others to join in on their efforts, beginning with open moderated conversation.

We will explore the following questions:

1) How can library workflows contribute to institutional bias (and therefore, societal bias), and

2) What are the values and assumptions that may undergird library workflows?

The session also gives tips on making a case to managers to support operational changes that provide more inclusive library services.

Wondering how your library can better support community members involved in legal issues, particularly those with few resources at their disposal? Come to this session and learn about exciting and free ways to expand your ability to serve legal needs. You will learn about models you can use and adapt for your library, free resources including plain language/accessible publications, staff training opportunities and public programming which can be offered through partner organizations. This session will boost your confidence in your ability to support the legal information needs in any community.

In 2017 the West Vancouver Memorial Library received a Canada 150 Community Fund grant to plan and implement activities to share and promote an understanding of Canadian and local history as a way to encourage conversations about reconciliation. Honouring Reconciliation: Hearing the Truth consisted of Reading Circles, an educational exhibit, a film series and a panel discussion. It was clear from the beginning that planning this initiative was different from our usual program planning. The planning team members grappled with a number of questions. How do we create meaningful events when our processes and deadlines made it impossible to consult with Indigenous people in advance? How do we prepare ourselves to work with protocols that are new to us and that respect Indigenous ways of learning and knowing? How do we create a safe space for Library staff and members of the public to discuss topics that can be personal and emotional? This session will explore the ways that we faced these challenges through training, collaboration, dialogue and a willingness to consider new ways of operating. It will also outline the implications for the Library's work culture in the future as well as how we were impacted as individuals.

As managers and supervisors, we often blame individual employees when they disengage or seem to lack motivation. But what if it's not them? What if it's us: the systems, practices and management techniques we use that cause the problem? Awareness of our role in employee disengagement is key to improvement and a happier, more engaged workplace. This session will introduce participants to the latest research on healthy workplaces and uncover the seemingly innocuous workplace and management practices that demotivate staff and fuel employee disengagement. By understanding what lies at the heart of employee disengagement, we can become better managers and advocates for our departments, our libraries, and ourselves.

Generously Sponsored By: Vancouver Public Library

What do children’s librarians and doctors have in common? Both know the health benefits of reading at home and want to share that message with families... but we can’t do it on our own! To meet our mutual goal of positioning reading as part of healthy child development, libraries and health practitioners need to abandon the culture of ‘doing it on our own.’ Library-health collaborations can help staff overcome many of the organizational challenges that exist in each sphere, including limited time, space and resources, and can help us meet our shared goals around parent literacy support. This session will explore how library-health partnerships enhance the goals and values of organizations in both spheres and will look at the recent collaboration between Vancouver Public Library and the BC Children’s Hospital Resident Continuity Clinic as an example of success.

Generously Sponsored By: Whitehots Inc. Intelligent Library Solutions

Focused on the provision of service, discussions about libraries tend to focus on the people they serve. However, the promotion of safe spaces, healthy cultures, and access to information starts with those providing those services. Library employees not only work to serve diverse communities, they are also part of those communities. This session will explore the dynamics of work-culture, focusing specifically on the ways the quality of service work can be greatly influenced by approaches in mindfulness as frame for building more inclusive and welcoming environments. Drawing from experience in other sectors while pursuing studies in library and information technology, these session presenters will challenge participants to consider how they engage in service work and how that work should change to meet the growing complexities and needs of communities. This session will be informed by questions like: Do libraries adequately support the varied socio-economic interests of our communities? Do they reflect the multicultural and multigenerational nature of our neighbourhoods? Are people working in libraries adequately empowered to engage with and support their patrons?

Interested in how library folks relate to net neutrality, privacy, public space, media ownership, and democracy? The BCLA’s Information Policy Committee invites a series of surprise guest speakers from inside and outside the BC library community to help us set the stage for the coming year. We guarantee you’ll learn new things and meet new people. No matter what your role in a library, we hope you’ll join us for an informative and provocative conference session!

In this session Emilee Gilpin will draw on some of her own experience, navigating many worlds and worldviews, attempting to conduct her work in a safe, respectful and anti-oppressive way. She will discuss the power of language, the importance of developing and respecting relationships and ways to recognize and avoid harmful narratives of often over-exploited peoples and communities.

Generously Sponsored By: SFU Library

Recent surveys show that precarious employment is on the rise in both public library and postsecondary environments. In this session, precariously employed library staff will chart a history of precarity in libraries and explore its effects on library service and work culture. In addition to discussing whether precarity is contrary to diversity and inclusion, the panelists will present original research on the employment landscape in Canadian libraries and share library workers’ perceptions of precarious work. By situating precarity within the BC library context, the panelists will open it up as as a topic for discussion and invite attendees to consider how they experience, enable, and resist precarity in their work environments.

At the heart of library values is access - that library resources should be equally and equitably available. It is an often quoted value, but people living in poverty still lack access to many essential library resources and service. Many of the barriers to access are directly implemented by libraries through policy, institutional culture and practice.
As neoliberal policies have decimated social services, people living in poverty have increasing informational, recreational, and social needs that are going unmet. Some libraries have slowly begun adapting to meet these needs but stigma, ignorance and entrenched policy and practices contribute to a reluctance to embrace this role fully.
However, all libraries have the opportunity to develop meaningful library service for people living in poverty. The Courtenay branch of Vancouver Island Regional Library has developed Connect, a program aimed at improving access to library resources, providing lifelong learning opportunities, developing relationships and building communities. The program is a model for expanding library service and resources to underserved populations, addressing stigma and dismantling internal barriers to access.
The development and implementation of Connect is the story of a branch’s culture shift, away from stigma and towards understanding. It is about community development and relationship building, as well as failure, resistance and hope. This session will also explore the role of libraries in community poverty reduction strategies and the role of library workers as advocates for poverty reduction.
Library manager Colleen Nelson and Housing Outreach Worker Stasia Hasumi will co-faciliate this program. 

Generously Sponsored By: Library Bound Inc.

On the surface, most human endeavors seem simple. We mean to do something often because we value certain things and not others, we have certain resources, and we wonder how well we did in the end. In reality, most human endeavors are complex and often open to multiple interpretations. Libraries and library services are a human endeavor of just this sort. On the surface, the endeavor seems relatively simple. Identify needs of users, develop strategies for meeting those needs and determine how well we did so and/or describe our resources available for users. This framework is common in evaluation and especially in human endeavors where there are “consumers” or “clients” or “users.” But the library world is considerably more complex, with multiple stakeholders vying for their potentially competing needs to be met and new ways in which library resources and services are connected to broad social issues. And so, evaluation of libraries and library services needs also to be much more complex. Evaluators need to step up and be as heroic in their efforts as libraries and librarians are in theirs. This complexity will be better served if evaluation considers 1) whose interests ought to be considered and in what measure and 2) realistic, accurate, contemporary understandings of library resources and services.

Sandra Mathison is Professor of Education at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on educational evaluation and especially on the potential and limits of evaluation to support democratic ideals and promote justice in education. Her research focuses in large part on the intended and unintended consequences of government mandated high stakes testing on teachers, students and quality of education. She has conducted national large- and small-scale evaluations of K-12, post-secondary, and informal educational programs and curricula; published articles in the leading evaluation journals; and edited and authored a number of books. She is editor of the Encyclopedia of Evaluation, co-editor (with E. Wayne Ross) of Defending Public Schools: The Nature and Limits of Standards Based Reform and Assessment and Battleground Schools. She is co-author (with Melissa Freeman) of Researching Children’s Experiences. She was Editor-in-Chief of New Directions for Evaluation and is currently co-editor of Critical Education and a member of the Institute for Critical Education Studies. She is the Executive Director of the Institute for Public Education – BC, a research think tank focusing on public education in British Columbia.

Discover your colleagues’ hidden talents!

Join us for the first ever BCLA Variety Show, featuring the performative chops you never knew your colleagues possessed. Cash bar and snacks available, lots of cheering suggested. Lineup as follows:

Linda Chobotuck
For just about her whole life, Linda has been a singer-songwriter and a folksinger, two related but not identical skill sets. She is perhaps best known as a singer and writer of labour songs, the most widely recorded of which is Canning Salmon, which she wrote years ago while working in a cannery in Richmond. In 1990, she won the Mayworks Song Competition. A long time member of the Vancouver Folk Song Society, Linda has sung with various groups too obscure to even have an Internet presence. She got her library technician certificate in 1981 and an MLS from SLAIS in 1991. She has written quite a few library-related songs over the years. Linda is currently Burnaby Public Library's sole full-time cataloguing librarian, but under normal circumstances she promises not to sing the date-due-stamping shanty.

Inti Dewey
Inti managed, in reality, to run away and join the circus. After a 3-year circus training program in Cologne Germany he spent almost a decade performing around the world. More recently he has been an auxiliary public librarian in Surrey and North Vancouver for the past 3 years, wowing audiences for large event storytelling by integrating juggling, clowning and storytime songs or fingerplays.

Kaya Fraser
Kaya Fraser is a Digital Access Librarian at West Vancouver Memorial Library. She moonlights as a singer-songwriter, with two albums to her name and another in development that will hopefully come out before she reaches retirement age. The Montreal Gazette said of her debut recording: "Elements of country, soul, and sultry acoustic pop are combined with sophistication and polish ... Fraser's moving songs don't really need anything more, except to be discovered."

Andre Chrys Iwanchuk
Andre is a Vancouver singer-songwriter who delivers roots rock songs that blend influences from rock, Americana, blues, and soul. Andre Chrys began his music career in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He paid his dues in hardworking Canadian bands that toured across Canada, playing clubs and festivals. Life, love and reality took him down a dozen different roads since then, finally drawing him to the west coast, where he currently works as a Business Librarian at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. His latest release, Window to Nowhere, is a new record with an old soul. Catch Andre playing live in the hardest-working music venues in Vancouver, Canada and beyond.

Christie Menzo
Christie currently works at the Vancouver Public Library as Assistant Manager, Early Years. A graduate of the Etobicoke School for the Arts Musical theatre program, Christie has starred in productions of The Wizard of Oz, Tommy, Seussical, Kiss Me Kate and Les Miserables. She now spends her time reading children’s books and singing at home for her fluffy canine companion Barney and equally fluffy husband, Isaac.

Candie Tanaka
Candie is a trans writer and artist exploring intersectionality with words on paper and also with digital technologies in innovative ways that play with content and form. Candie is also a Library Assistant at the Vancouver Public Library’s West Point Grey Branch. They are a creative writing graduate of The Writer’s Studio program at Simon Fraser University and have a BFA in Intermedia from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design. Candie is currently writing a first novel with the working title of Tanaka and Co., as well as penning a suite of poems about working on the waterfront. Candie is also the Executive Director at the International Centre of Arts and Technology, a literary focused community makerspace in Vancouver. ICOAAT is home to the Dominion Reading Series, Storytelling with Drag Queens and the Syntax Art Gallery, as well as being a technology hub for all things literary and text related.​

Generously Sponsored By: CVS Midwest Tape

Generously Sponsored By: SFU Library

Experimental Content Warning!
In this session…
You will be invited to move your body.
You will be invited to speak to people you don’t already know.
You will be encouraged to get curious about, and perhaps even play with, things that might make you uncomfortable.

We don’t see discomfort as something that needs to be automatically avoided.
Be warned! Let’s turn toward the discomfort. Let’s play!

There are four central questions that we wish to consider during this session:

1. What assumptions are made about comfort, and from a place of comfort, when we typically engage in discussions and decision-making in work settings?

2. How much are our institutions willing to engage with the discomfort that can attend change?

3. When libraries and institutions, and those who work within them, turn away from uncomfortable topics/people/moments, what kinds of privilege are they enacting; and where does this discomfort go?

4. What is the role of discomfort in the ongoing creation of the work culture?

We have chosen to use the concepts of comfort and discomfort to frame this discussion, allowing a focus on the ways that institutions and systems maintain the established (comfortable, expected) way of doing things, while simultaneously creating discomfort for anyone who does not fit into or wish to simply “go along” with this established way.

Sara Ahmed’s writings about Feminist Killjoys is pertinent, particularly in her identification that when people choose to speak up, refusing to simply “get along” or “go along,” those people are often dismissed as the problem, and no efforts are made to address the real issue that has been raised. In this way, and to borrow another concept from Ahmed, the problem “sticks” to the person who has chosen to speak up … that is until they resign themselves to simply “getting along.” This is the essence of indoctrination and is a way that work cultures, even those that do not serve us, can be perpetuated indefinitely.

We are aware that these topics are deeply linked to vulnerability. Our focus is therefore to create opportunities for playful contributions outside of the typical conventions of discussion, which can make it all too easy to identify the “discontents.”

Looking for simple answers and/or a dazzling showcase of how to do community-led programming? You won’t find them in this session – what you’ll find is an honest discussion about why community-led programming is so difficult to do. We’ll bring together a panel of library staff who are struggling to define and execute community-led programming in their communities. We ask: why and how does public library workplace culture create barriers to community-led programming? Why do we want to do community-led programming anyway? Is it just a buzzy fad? If I do it, will I be working my way out of my job or a part of my job that I really love?

Generously Sponsored By: Vancouver Public Library

Can I use Photoshop to make a business card? Should I be scared that Facebook is mining my data? What’s Minecraft? How do I make a website to sell my hats? Which apps are safe and educational for my preschooler? Can you help me email photos to my grandchildren? How do I spot fake news?

Demand for digital literacy learning opportunities at the public library is both increasing and diversifying. Many still need to learn the basics; privacy and security concerns are ever-present; and people of all ages want to explore advanced, cutting edge and creative technology.

Your library needs to not only decide what to offer, but how it will fit in with community needs, strategic goals, and staffing. Join an interactive discussion with panelists from four B.C. libraries who have recently created new, evidence-based digital literacy frameworks, programs and resources. Learn what we learned, what worked and what didn’t, and how you can adapt our work for your library.

How can libraries foster innovation in our organizations and institutions? This panel will offer tips and tricks from Innovation experts on how to increase creativity and innovation among our workforce. Topics will include recruitment and staff development, strategic planning and values, organizational structures and frameworks, HR practices, physical space, flexible working conditions, risk and experimentation.

Your mission – BCLC delegates! – should you decide to accept it, is to examine an unclassified CFLA/FCAB document “Statement on Intellectual Freedom and Libraries” [live link to http://cfla-fcab.ca/en/guidelines-and-position-papers/statement-on-intellectual-freedom-and-libraries/] in preparation for sequestered roundtable juries on ultra-sensitive library issues. Your challenge: To deal with three recent Canadian case studies, each one impacting library intellectual freedom principles in different ways that will find roundtable delegates navigating between the proverbial rock and the hard place.

The first case relates to a high profile but suddenly-damaged presenter in the ground-breaking Forward Thinking Library Speaker Series, created by the library to build community and create dialogue. The second involves a library meeting room rental to a white nationalist group, engulfing its rentals policy in bitter public dispute. The third implicates a children’s story time program featuring drag queen artists fiercely denounced on social media.

As shared ideology in the body politic becomes more fractured, polarized viewpoints more strident, and tolerable boundaries on free speech more threatened, the political stakes could not be higher for library leaders determined to expand their contributions to public service and community life beyond historic collection access models.

By hosting speakers and programs – in addition to collections – that some find controversial, offensive, and even intolerable, library leaders are exploring new ways of raising public awareness and enhancing public knowledge and understanding. But, as forums for ideas and free expression, at what cost will it be to themselves and their institutions? In an increasingly divisive culture, greater visibility means greater risk of public backlash, institutional alienation, and personal and professional isolation.

Library core values are being questioned – and not just by the general citizenry. Criticism from within the profession is mounting as well, perhaps to an unprecedented level of public airing.

Library leaders and workers in all sectors are thus urgently called to examine and re-examine core library values with each new challenge to free expression. What library speech should be free in a climate of increasing ideological polarization and narrowing boundaries of public tolerance?

Mission Impossible presenters – EPL CEO Pilar Martinez and UA PE Alvin Schrader – will brief you on each challenging case study as a framework for roundtable deliberations. As always, accountability or liability for roundtable conclusions and action plans is strictly disavowed by your MI presenters. With apologies to the 20th century TV series.

This highly interactive two-part workshop will explore the wisdom and practices of successful board and library director relationships. The experiences of library directors and trustees from all sizes and types of libraries from across BC will shape the discussions and activities. No matter how strong your board and library director relationship, you will leave this workshop feeling more confident in your knowledge and expertise about governance; trustee and staff roles; and the value of investing time and effort in your board and library director relationship.
Part 1. will focus on the goals and interests in the room that may include (but are in no way limited to!):
• Sharing leadership with transparency, trust, and communication
• Communicating values and an inspiring vision
• Aligning strategy and operations by being mission focused
• Managing conflict, transitions, and other challenges constructively
• Articulating your unique role and value as a trustee or as a library director
• Developing boards from orientation through to succession planning—including improving diversity and conducting a Board self-assessment
• Hiring, supporting, and evaluating the library director

Part 2. will focus on participants developing a high-level plan or goal(s) for developing their board/library director relationship.
Participants will leave this two-part workshop ready to strengthen the board/library director relationship they want and that their library and community needs.

Presenters:
Jenny Benedict, Director of Library Services, West Vancouver Memorial Library
Jenny has served as a senior public library administrator for ten years, seven of them as Director of Library Services at West Vancouver Memorial Library, and is Past Chair of the Association of British Columbia Public Library Directors. She is keenly interested in working with Boards to develop strong leadership for strategy, advocacy, and library infrastructure.

David Carter, Chair, West Vancouver Memorial Library Board
David is in his 7th year on the West Vancouver Memorial Library Board and is serving a second year as Chair. David is also Vice President of the British Columbia Library Trustees Association. He is a strong believer in forward-looking public libraries powered by exceptional relationships between the Board, the Library Director and staff.

Scott Hargrove, CEO, Fraser Valley Regional Library
Scott has twenty-five years of experience in the library profession, with extensive experience in both library and technology leadership. His current professional focus includes the rapidly changing role of public libraries in their communities, new library business models, and the natural intersection between libraries, communities and technology. He frequently speaks on these topics at conferences and to special interest groups.

Scott holds a B.Ed from the University of Victoria, an MSc in Computer Science from the University of York, England, and the Executive Master of Library and Information Studies from San Jose State University.
Chuck Stam, Chair, Fraser Valley Regional Library Board
Chuck is in his 5th year on the Fraser Valley Regional Library Board and is serving his second year as Chair. Chuck has been a Councilor in the City of Chilliwack since he was first elected in 1999, and is a Managing Partner at Precision Building Design Associates Ltd. He is a passionate advocate for libraries and values strong Board relationships.

Wendy Wright, Library Director, Smithers Public Library
Wendy has always loved connecting people with stories, ideas, and information. She worked in bookstores and the publishing industry for nearly two decades before side-stepping into the endlessly creative world of libraries.

Wally Bergen, Chair, Smithers Public Library Board
Wallace (Wally) believes that Libraries are agents of change! Our world is always evolving with new and exciting ideas hitting us as a storm. Building communication and working together is a critical step in optimizing and using change

Babs Kelly, Executive Director, BCLTA
Babs has successfully used a community engagement approach for supporting the work of not-for-profit and public sector boards for over 25 years. She has extensive experience in governance and is currently a board director with PACE Society and with the Douglas College Board of Governors.

Generously Sponsored By: Vancouver Public Library

Libraries are dealing with extraordinary pressures to deliver services in a time of rapid change, where convenience is the number one priority for many of our users. We need to review and adjust our organizational structures and the roles of all library workers to meet the changing needs and expectations of the communities we aim to serve. We must rethink how we work, where we work, and when we work.

Join us to learn about how Vancouver Public Library is implementing a branch staffing model with new staff roles and new ways of looking at how we work together. We’ll provide an overview of our review process and insight into our implementation plan, communication strategies, and approach to change leadership.

Focusing on the conference themes of work and culture, we will describe our new staff roles and how we engaged staff to help us define them. We’ll share the process for developing job descriptions which reflect how library work has changed to be more team-based and collaborative with higher expectations for technological competence. We’ll tell you about the transition training plans we’ve developed to prepare almost 400 staff members to move to a more efficient and flexible model which will enable us to meet our strategic priorities and respond to emerging opportunities.

And we’ll discuss the bumps we’ve encountered along the way and how we are continuously adapting and updating our plan as the environment continues to evolve around us.

As the Federal Government undertakes the mandatory five year review of Canada’s 2012 Copyright Modernization Act, libraries have an opportunity to engage with policy makers in order to secure continued access to information under fair dealing, to ensure we and our users can exercise our rights, to explore Indigenous knowledge issues, and consider new ideas. Learn about the issues CFLA’s Copyright Committee is prioritizing for the review; what library services and users are affected in the process; how global conversations affect us in Canada; and then ask questions and discuss priorities. We’ll start from the basics, no prior copyright engagement necessary!

Generously Sponsored By: SFU Library

Interested in building your leadership skills and wondering what options exist? Wondering if you could manage a development program alongside personal and work commitments, and whether it would be a good fit for your personal situation? Come hear about your colleagues’ first-hand experiences with degree programs such MBAs and MPAs, library sector programs such as Northern Exposure to Leadership, LLEAD and the Canadian Urban Libraries Council’s Public Library Leaders program, and other learning pathways including grassroots leadership development, individual coaching, personal study in social impact strategy and project management, courses offered through the Municipal Administration Training Institute and more.

Between 1883 and 1996, the Government of Canada and church organizations operated the Indian Residential School System. An estimated 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were removed from their families, homes, languages, and lands. These schools were part of Canada’s official policy, which aimed to eliminate Indigenous cultures and, through assimilation, cause Indigenous peoples to cease to exist. When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report was published in June 2015, it documented a history of abuse and neglect of Indigenous children.

The Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre (IRSHDC) at UBC provides access for former Indian Residential School students, their families, and communities to records of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (housed at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation Archives). The IRSHDC will also provide information resources from partner institutions in support of education, public information, research, and dialogue about the Indian Residential School System and its legacies. The Centre will continually collect and integrate Survivor stories, records, information, and conversations about the residential school system into its collections from donors and institutional partners. The IRSHDC collections include digital copies as well as original records donated to the Centre.
In this session, IRSHDC researcher Allison Mills will discuss the purposes of the IRSHDC and introduce their recently launched digital collections website (https://collections.irshdc.ubc.ca/) and the material available there, complications faced by the Centre in constructing the system, and how librarians might make use of the IRSHDC’s collections in their work.

Generously Sponsored By: SFU Library

Open Education is about more than opening resources, it is also about opening pedagogy but what does that mean? What does open education have to do with social justice? Do we believe that education is about leveling the playing field and, at its best, addressing issues of injustice, privilege and exclusion? Are open education practices, at their core, about access, equity, innovation and creativity? If so, how is the open education movement embodying those values?
Join a panel to discuss the broad impact of open educational practices. How are these practices living up to their potential, and how are they failing to do so? Can open education help provide a more equitable future where a multitude of diverse voices are heard and respected? Librarians are key contributors in the open education movement as an extension of their historical roles to provide safe places of learning that are open and available to all; or, is that traditional role a myth? Let’s discuss.

This highly interactive two-part workshop will explore the wisdom and practices of successful board and library director relationships. The experiences of library directors and trustees from all sizes and types of libraries from across BC will shape the discussions and activities. No matter how strong your board and library director relationship, you will leave this workshop feeling more confident in your knowledge and expertise about governance; trustee and staff roles; and the value of investing time and effort in your board and library director relationship.

Part 1. will focus on the goals and interests in the room that may include (but are in no way limited to!):
• Sharing leadership with transparency, trust, and communication
• Communicating values and an inspiring vision
• Aligning strategy and operations by being mission focused
• Managing conflict, transitions, and other challenges constructively
• Articulating your unique role and value as a trustee or as a library director
• Developing boards from orientation through to succession planning—including improving diversity and conducting a Board self-assessment
• Hiring, supporting, and evaluating the library director

Part 2. will focus on participants developing a high-level plan or goal(s) for developing their board/library director relationship.
Participants will leave this two-part workshop ready to strengthen the board/library director relationship they want and that their library and community needs.

Presenters:
Jenny Benedict, Director of Library Services, West Vancouver Memorial Library
Jenny has served as a senior public library administrator for ten years, seven of them as Director of Library Services at West Vancouver Memorial Library, and is Past Chair of the Association of British Columbia Public Library Directors. She is keenly interested in working with Boards to develop strong leadership for strategy, advocacy, and library infrastructure.

David Carter, Chair, West Vancouver Memorial Library Board
David is in his 7th year on the West Vancouver Memorial Library Board and is serving a second year as Chair. David is also Vice President of the British Columbia Library Trustees Association. He is a strong believer in forward-looking public libraries powered by exceptional relationships between the Board, the Library Director and staff.

Scott Hargrove, CEO, Fraser Valley Regional Library
Scott has twenty-five years of experience in the library profession, with extensive experience in both library and technology leadership. His current professional focus includes the rapidly changing role of public libraries in their communities, new library business models, and the natural intersection between libraries, communities and technology. He frequently speaks on these topics at conferences and to special interest groups.

Scott holds a B.Ed from the University of Victoria, an MSc in Computer Science from the University of York, England, and the Executive Master of Library and Information Studies from San Jose State University.
Chuck Stam, Chair, Fraser Valley Regional Library Board
Chuck is in his 5th year on the Fraser Valley Regional Library Board and is serving his second year as Chair. Chuck has been a Councilor in the City of Chilliwack since he was first elected in 1999, and is a Managing Partner at Precision Building Design Associates Ltd. He is a passionate advocate for libraries and values strong Board relationships.

Wendy Wright, Library Director, Smithers Public Library
Wendy has always loved connecting people with stories, ideas, and information. She worked in bookstores and the publishing industry for nearly two decades before side-stepping into the endlessly creative world of libraries.

Wally Bergen, Chair, Smithers Public Library Board
Wallace (Wally) believes that Libraries are agents of change! Our world is always evolving with new and exciting ideas hitting us as a storm. Building communication and working together is a critical step in optimizing and using change

Babs Kelly, Executive Director, BCLTA
Babs has successfully used a community engagement approach for supporting the work of not-for-profit and public sector boards for over 25 years. She has extensive experience in governance and is currently a board director with PACE Society and with the Douglas College Board of Governors.

Generously Sponsored By: Vancouver Public Library

Due to increased societal and legal visibility, libraries are becoming more aware and responsive to the needs and issues of transgender employees and patrons. This is an emerging area of consideration for librarians with a desire to create community connection and equip people with the information they seek.

For many, transgender issues are new territory. Concepts of gender identity may feel overwhelming. Attendees will be introduced to terms and concepts related to gender identity as well as the unique challenges and barriers faced by transgender patrons specific to libraries. The session is intended to be interactive and informational with practical and inclusive measures to improve transgender experiences of libraries. The presenter brings an open and friendly approach to provide a session that aims to be highly engaging.

The session will also summarize best practices and lessons learned from TransFocus’ process and outcomes while working with the Vancouver Public Library. These changes include policies, data, documentation, communications, washrooms, and gendered programs to prepare their systems, spaces, and practices to be more inclusive of transgender people. These efforts will highlight context and considerations and the need for careful planning and sequenced actions when developing transgender inclusion measures.
 
Learning Objectives
• Increase familiarity with and confidence in using gender identity concepts and terms;
• Identify and apply best practices to tackle increasingly diverse gender realities and situations; and
• Understand and appreciate value of deliberative action within libraries, including broader benefit to more than just transgender patrons, resulting in win-win situations.


Take-Away
TransFocus will provide attendees with one-page handout that contains easy and quick steps towards transgender inclusion with minimal or no the need for resources and personnel.

Academic library tropes include the ideal of these spaces as places of comfort, quiet, and refuge for both library users and library employees; however, Library and Information Science (LIS) literature increasingly has covered issues of burnout, toxicity, and incivility. Missing from these discussions is the concern of low morale and its unique reflection of and impact on institutional culture, organizational behavior, library development, and the library workforce - and how it affects and reflects the values of modern librarianship. This session will review the catalyst for and design of a qualitative study (Kendrick 2017) and reveal the causes, systems of impact, and short- and long-term effects of low morale on academic librarians and their careers.

Kendrick, Kaetrena Davis (2017). The low morale experience of academic librarians: A phenomenological study. Journal of Library Administration. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01930826.2017.13683

To advance the process of reconciliation, in 2017, Greater Victoria Public Library engaged in a series of new initiatives related to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, including collection development, territorial acknowledgement , community engagement, programming, as well as staff professional development.
While showcasing some of GVPL innovative ways of engaging with Indigenous communities, such as “Reconciliation: Opening the Door to Conversations”, a special four part speaker series created in partnership with Victoria Native Friendship Centre and Royal BC Museum, this conference session will mostly focus on the cultural learning and significant impacts these programs had on GVPL patrons, staff and work environment.
Public Services at GVPL are rooted in a community inspired model, celebrating the diversity of our communities and extending the reach of the library beyond existing facilities and traditional venues. Partnering with Victoria Native Friendship Centre and using venues such as Wawadit’la, Mungo Martin House ensured that library staff, patrons and community partners participating in these events had opportunities to create a virtual Village, a sacred space where healing can start and the values that guided Indigenous villages for generations can be experienced.
The Residential School System in Canada existed for many generations and its legacies remain with us today. While it will take generations to fully understand its impact and for genuine healing and reconciliation to happen, GVPL is proud to share its start into becoming a Village, bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities and providing opportunities to listen, acknowledge the truth and facilitate compassionate acts of reconciliation. The session will highlight the special partnership between GVPL and Victoria Native Friendship Centre library, the only lending library of all Native Friendship Centres in Canada, with a focus on their common goal to enhance institutional work culture with Indigenous perspectives.

IIn the past year, the BCDL developed a demonstration site to ignite interest, created a communications framework to reach stakeholders, and established an interim governance structure to provide direction to the project. In early 2018, a comprehensive Business Analysis was initiated, as a means to identify sustainability and service model considerations. Concurrently, technical infrastructure was further developed by the BCDL admin team, to demonstrate service possibilities within an evolving digitization and preservation ecosystem. We are eager to share our progress to date and hear from stakeholders!

The BC Cataloguing and Technical Services Interest group of BCLA (BCCATs) encourages you to join a session on Library and Archives Canada’s (LAC) launch of a new National Union Catalogue. LAC will be migrating the Amicus Canadian Union Catalogue system to an OCLC portal. The transition from Amicus to OCLC's services is a major change for Canadian libraries and for LAC. On the agenda is an overview of the new system with particular emphasis on the implications for ILL and cataloguing, an update on the transition of LAC's internal functions to OCLC and an opportunity to ask a representative from Library and Archives Canada questions surrounding the local impact of this change to LAC services. Come and discuss the role that LAC and the National Union Catalogue play in the work libraries do in support of library access, Canadian culture and Canadian content. This is a topic for every library that has ever used the LAC services, a topic for library people engaged on topics of the identity of libraries in the Canadian context and a topic for specialists and generalists who follow library trends. Help to bring BC perspective to the development and change of the Union Catalogue of Canada.

This session focuses on strategies for building effective working relationships with local government. You’ll gain ideas and insights on how to build an action plan for your library organization, by addressing the following questions: What are your local government’s priorities and how can you align with them? What are the plans and policies you need to be aware of, such as the Official Community Plan? How can trustees and library directors build stronger relationships with local government elected officials and senior management? How can these relationships be maintained over the long term, so that public libraries remain highly valued and adequately supported? Alison McNeil brings her 25 years of local government experience to this session, as a community planner, policy analyst, senior manager and instructor in Capilano University’s School of Public Administration.

Like all relationships, Labour-Management can settle into a relationship rut, with dangerous assumptions, fraught communication, and avoidance of big issues. It can also serve as a venue for regular check ins, information sharing, idea generation, problem solving, and a signal to staff that both union and management are paying attention to the workplace. In this session, we encourage you to be honest about what you want out of the relationship and to listen to what the “other side” is looking for. Instead of a panel discussion, we’re going to solicit statements from both union and management before the session and during it, and invite participants to discuss how they can put their assumptions and biases aside and work together more effectively.

Like our peers in public and academic settings, law libraries have been facing increased budget and resourcing pressures. We are being asked to align more closely with the strategic objectives of our organizations, and demonstrate concrete return on investment. Changing trends in legal service provision and an increasingly competitive legal market equally require our organizations to respond externally to client needs in new ways.

For us, both challenges came to a head in January 2017, when our office integrated with a global law firm, and our library department was absorbed into an international team of library professionals. While some resulting changes have been easy to take in stride, others will take concerted, long-term change management attention to succeed.

Our services, users, collections and workplace culture have shifted, but our core values as library professionals have remained the same. We have leveraged our traditional research, training and facilitation skills, and applied them to the development of new services and collegial relationships to foster greater information sharing and collaboration across the organization, and externally. More broadly, we have relied on our profession’s service-focused model to break down information silos, raise information- and knowledge-sharing concerns, and serve as champions of change.

In this session, we will present some of the specific challenges we have faced, and discuss the tools we have used to identify priorities and develop solutions. We will discuss the shifting needs of our users, how we have responded, and our successes and on-going challenges, and will talk more broadly about the nuances of workplace culture change that result from multiple organizations coming together under a common banner.

Generously Sponsored By: DFC Events Inc.

Branding is an intentional strategy for shaping the public’s perception of our organisations. While many libraries promote themselves by pushing marketing out to intended audiences, this session focuses on establishing public recognition and reputation through internal brand culture.
Internal brand culture is the core identity of your library that manifest itself in every aspect of your internal and external service delivery. Library staff are the face of that identity and the heart of your Library’s story. Done well, a strong internal brand culture results in passionate staff, raving fans and eager funders. If imbedded permanently in our organisations, our libraries will endure as we evolve.

Participants will discover:
• Principles of strong internal brands
• Elements of an organization’s identity
• A four-step approach for creating an internal brand culture that thrives

In this talk, Dr. Nason discusses the confluence of family history, surveillance and resistance found in her grandmother’s boarding school letters and records. In this archive, the gendered nature of settler colonialism is voiced not only by the school officials but also members of her own family. How one writes and speaks to these difficult personal histories in research is a central question Nason explores in this presentation.

The presenters will:
Define international librarianship and discuss its scope
Share tips and reflections from the presenters own volunteer trips to 6 different countries
Discuss the different types of volunteer trips and how to find opportunities or create your own
Highlight the personal and professional benefits of volunteering internationally and how to share this PD on return to the workplace

Join staff from the Ministry of Education who will discuss how we can work together as partners to implement the provincial vision for public library service in BC. Hear from this unique perspective in viewing public library services at the provincial level on how we move forward together in enhancing public library service in BC.

Generously Sponsored By: BiblioCommons

Sponsored By: CUPE BC

Libraries are not neutral institutions. They provide services and resources to their communities, based on a set of professional values that promote democracy, access, and social justice. Those of us who work in libraries, as social beings, are likewise not neutral. While some library leaders try to keep their political
and social agendas separate from their work, others see them as inextricably intertwined. In this talk, Chris Bourg will describe her attempt to bring an explicitly feminist agenda to library leadership, and her belief that libraries can and should promote social justice.

Chris Bourg is the Director of Libraries at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she also has oversight of the MIT Press. Prior to assuming her role at MIT, Chris worked for 12 years in the Stanford University Libraries, most recently as the Associate University Librarian for Public Services. Before Stanford, she spent 10 years as an active duty U.S. Army officer, including three years on the faculty at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Chris is a member of the Steering Committee of SocArXiv, a new open access platform for social science research, and is currently co-chairing an MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research. She is a member of the Board of Directors for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers Committee to Visit the University Library. Chris recently co-chaired an MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on the Future of Libraries, and just completed a term as Chair of the Committee on Diversity and Inclusion of the Association of Research Libraries.

Chris has written and spoken extensively on the future of research libraries, diversity and inclusion in higher education, and the role libraries play in advancing social justice and democracy. She received her BA from Duke University, her MA from the University of Maryland, and her MA and PhD in sociology from Stanford.