Canadian librarians talk research
This year marks 10th edition of Concordia's annual Library Research Forum, an event University Librarian Gerald Beasley calls the most important public event of the year for Concordia’s libraries.
“It’s a great way to open a window and invite our colleagues from Montreal, Toronto and elsewhere, to come and present some of the new thinking around libraries, which I find to be always extremely stimulating and very engaging,” he said.
The event featured five presentations on a range of topics; from Concordia librarian Robert Tomaszewski’s presentation, Publishing in Non-Library Journals for Promoting Scientific Information Literacy, to an examination of how people grieve a lost loved one on Facebook (by librarian Kathleen Scheaffer from the University of Toronto).
As Beasley explains, the event is designed to encourage researchers in the early stages of their projects by providing them with a place to present their work and receive supportive and well-informed feedback.
“That’s the kind of feedback the speakers need for their project, because it might help them reformulate it or move them along a little bit,” he said.
Giovanna Badia, a liaison librarian at McGill’s Schulich Library of Science and Engineering, presented her research project, entitled Using Citation Analysis to Identify the Best Database to Search: A Case Study in Chemical Engineering. After her presentation, the audience put forth numerous questions and suggestions.
“It’s feedback that I’ll be able to use to continue my research,” Badia said. “I’m very happy to have been given the opportunity to present here … It was a little nerve-racking but very useful.”
Concordia librarian Joanna Duy presented her research project, An Analysis of Reciprocal Borrrowing Among Québec University Libraries, a collaboration with Vincent Larivière, assistant professor at the Université de Montréal’s École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information.
Duy said she also found the audience feedback very useful. “There were some points brought up that I had thought about along the way, but hadn’t actually formally included in the study, such as how the opening up of direct borrowing to undergraduate students may have affected the statistics,” she said.
As a side note, Duy mentioned that a lot of Concordia’s students are not aware that they can travel to other academic libraries down the road at McGill, elsewhere in Quebec, and even Canada, and borrow books as long as they acquire a CREPUQ (Conférence des recteurs et des principaux des universités du Québec) card. “We have to find a good way to publicize it, and encourage people to use it, because it’s really a low-cost alternative for libraries to share their resources,” she said.
The final speaker of the day was Gwendolyn Ebbett, Dean of the Library at the University of Windsor. During her keynote address, Ebbett emphasized the importance of creating an environment in Canada that supports library research.
“I think it’s crucial now, even more so than it was in the past, for us to be doing research in our own discipline … It will give better service.”
Ebbett praised Concordia for its continued commitment to library research, emphasized by the decade-long run of the university’s Library Research Forum. “To be able to sustain a very successful forum like this is just fantastic, and they are to be congratulated,” she said.
The importance of the forum in raising Concordia’s profile within the academic community is not lost on Concordia’s Collections Coordinator Geoffrey Little, who was on hand to present the various speakers. “It shows that we are a place that values research, that encourages research, and that encourages librarians to share the results of their work,” he said.
Related links:
• Concordia Libraries
• Canadian Association of Library Researchers