APLA 2019

We all see the profound changes taking place in our organizations and can probably agree that our human resources and the roles that people play are among the most complex and valuable assets of the organization. Management of these resources requires strategic thinking and thoughtful practice. So, why not use competency frameworks to amplify staff performance in ways that should ultimately result in greater individual and organizational success? Competencies are defined in many ways and there are numerous examples of competency development that we might incorporate into practice. Kathleen hopes to convince you that competency development and use is an important success factor to consider, and that we should all be familiar with the competency work that is being done in our field and the ways in which it might be used within our organizations. In this vein, she will also highlight the work of the CARL (Canadian Association of Research Libraries) Working Group on revising the CARL Core Competencies for 21st Century Librarians.

An interactive session in order to develop a vision, policy and strategy for Voilà Canada’s new National Union Catalogue. Library and Archives Canada (LAC) will give a short presentation on Voilà and some of the key challenges faced by the Canadian library community. The goal of the session is to develop with our key library stakeholders and library leaders a vision, policy and strategy for the future of Voilà in order to maximize participation and achieve greater representation by Canadian libraries. Following a short presentation by LAC there will be table discussion in order to get input from the library community on a new vision, policy and strategic direction for Voilà. We will also focus on some practical solutions and next step we need to take together in order to achieve this new vision, policy and strategic direction.

Manning, Raghavan, and Schütze (2008) define information retrieval as “finding material...of an unstructured nature...that satisfies an information need from within large collections.” In today’s modern information-dense society, information retrieval takes place both within and beyond library walls. And, as critical librarians state, from policies to services, libraries are “never neutral.” But, libraries are no longer the unique gatekeepers to the information universe. Thus the question arises, is a lack of neutrality unique to libraries? To address this question, this presentation aims to provide a solid overview of the present-day research on bias and diversity in popular algorithms and information retrieval systems while observing this analysis from the perspective of critical librarianship.