Atlantic Provinces Library Association 2021 Conference

“Special Special Collections”: Making a Space for Print Artifacts at the Vaughan Memorial Library

This talk details my MLIS practicum project at Acadia University, which sought to answer the question: “How should we manage ‘special’ library materials that do not fit within a library’s Special Collections mandate?”

This project arose in response to a high volume of materials labelled as “Rare Books” and housed in the Vaughan Memorial Library’s Special Collections that did not meet the library’s criteria for rare books as outlined in the Collection Development Policy (Acadia University, 2006). Though not technically rare, these materials possessed certain physical characteristics that made them too unique or valuable to be incorporated into general circulation. What should be done with these materials? To answer this question, this project analyzed current literature on the subject of special library materials as well as various institutional approaches to rare books collections. This poster shares findings from this analysis as well as my recommendations and rationale for dealing with these “special special” materials. Namely, to establish a Print Artifacts Collection within the library.

Canadian Responses to the Opioid Crisis 
The opioid crisis is a problem in communities across North America. The numbers are telling—deaths due to opioid use are growing, and Canada is in the midst of a health epidemic. A public health emergency was declared by BC’s provincial health officer in April 2016, due to a dramatic rise in drug overdoses and an increase in the illicit drug fentanyl (Ministry of Health, 2016). That year on average, there were more opioid related deaths than car accidents the year before (Belzak & Halverson, 2018).
Many libraries in the United States are implementing specific activities to respond to the crisis. This includes training staff to use naloxone (an antidote which temporarily reverses opioid overdoses), space modifications and programming initiatives. However, little research is available on what is happening at Canadian libraries. Specifically, how is the opioid crisis affecting Canadian libraries? How are Canadian libraries responding to the opioid crisis? What information gaps are present in Canadian libraries about the opioid crisis? Particularly, how is information shared between frontline staff such as librarians and assistants, and senior management? How does information gaps and a disconnected between frontline staff and management affect decision making in a library setting and the implementation of harm reduction initiatives such as naloxone?
This presentation will discuss how libraries are responding to the opioid crisis locally and nationally. Wiggans, who is conducting a thesis on this topic will share the project’s research methodology and preliminary results.

Let’s be library friends!
In September 2016, Annapolis Valley Regional Library (AVRL) began a partnership with Acadia University Library and NSCC Kingstec Library to offer leisure reading to their students. Boxes of books from the public library collection are sent to the university library, on a rotating basis. Acadia students may borrow or browse the books. In conjunction with this partnership, AVRL has presented escape rooms and other programs, and loans a Wii game console to the university library. Angela and Britanie will give you a quick overview of the partnership and how it has evolved.

Patrons and Palaeography: Helping With Historical Handwriting
There has been a surge of interest in historical handwriting in the past year as citizen volunteer their time to help institutions with crowd-sourced transcription projects during pandemic times. UNB Libraries has been creating palaeography help materials (tip sheets, letter examples, blog posts) and holding workshops for several years to aid students in accessing and interpreting primary documents which feature cursive writing. Undergrad students are often not familiar with cursive writing due to curriculum changes and by offering some assistance, it allows them the benefit of using documents in their original format. By providing basic palaeography help, patrons may more easily and readily utilize historical collections and assist in volunteer projects.

The Kids Are Alright: Supporting Parent Patrons at Acadia University's Vaughan Memorial Library
Acadia University’s Vaughan Memorial Library has implemented initiatives to support its parent patrons, who are students, faculty, staff, and community members. This brief talk will present the recently developed (2019) Children in the Library policy, as well as the child-friendly resources available at the library.

A First-Year Librarian Embedded in a First-Year Experience: Using a course's LMS to advance my learning
One-shot class-based sessions and one-on-one consultations are the basis for providing support to students and are most often provided in-person. However being able to support students online, whether they are on- or off-campus, is now the norm. Subject guides, website resources, and online chats are a great foundation for online support, but as for interacting directly with students after a one-shot, there is little opportunity without the student initiating the interaction. In this presentation, I discuss my experiences as a new librarian, who has interacted with a learning management system (LMS) as an undergraduate and graduate student, and now as an instructor.

As the librarian charged with supporting First-Year Experience (FYE) courses, I reached out to a professor of a FYE course with a proposal to participate in their course beyond the planned one-shot session, specifically through the university’s LMS (Moodle). The proposal detailed my plan to build upon the face-to-face one-shot library session by interacting with the students through a forum dedicated to library and research-related questions, as well as posting resources related to weekly course content.

Topics that will be explored in this presentation include lowering barriers for students to contact their librarian, keeping students aware and engaged, and supporting the concepts and tools covered in their face-to-face, one-shot library session. Additionally, a view into the specific online FYE courses will better equip me to understand student learning outcomes, and in turn, to develop better supports and teaching sessions for other FYE courses.