APLA 2019

From the vehicles we drive, to the thermostats in our homes, just about everything around us uses coding (also known as programming).
Code is the language used to tell technology what to do. You can think about coding like you would think about following a recipe in a cookbook. For any given recipe, you are given a set of ingredients and a sequence of instructions. This sequence of instructions is similar to creating an algorithm (or set of steps) which must be followed by a device to accomplish a task.
But, here’s where it gets tricky - your device doesn’t understand the human language. Your device needs its own set of instructions written in a language it can understand in order to operate. This is where learning to code comes in handy.
Just like math or reading, coding has become a foundational skill. Learning about coding at a young age helps kids understand the world around them and helps them to develop their creativity and problem-solving skills. This is where the Library can help!
The workshop will begin with an introduction to coding concepts. After you learn the basics, you’ll have the opportunity to get hands-on with block-based coding and coding games. Together, we’ll use Scratch, micro:bits, Ozobots, Dot and Dash robots and more. We will also discuss how you can integrate coding into programs at the library.

The transition from the MARC format to a linked data capable framework (BIBFRAME) will fundamentally change how libraries operate. Besides re-imagining how metadata is created and accessed, it will facilitate improved connection to datasets and vocabularies outside of our institutions. MARC has been the international standard for the distribution of library metadata since 1973, and for the past 45 years the MARC “container” has enabled libraries from around the world to share descriptive metadata with each other. However, with the growth of the Semantic Web and linked data over the past 15 years, librarians have increasingly found MARC to be problematic when sharing metadata outside of our domain.
As we begin to look beyond MARC, we are still left with many unanswered questions around what comes next and how linked data and BIBFRAME will be implemented in Canadian libraries.

This half day conference will provide an introduction to linked data, discuss BIBFRAME and its development, review various library initiatives working toward implementation, as well as look at some library linked data projects not directly related to BIBFRAME. The preconference will end with a discussion about alternatives to BIBFRAME some libraries are considering, and what libraries can do to start preparing their catalogues for the transition to a linked data environment.

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.

This panel session is co-hosted by the Atlantic Publishers' Marketing Association  and the Atlantic Provinces Library Association. Delegates of both the APLA and East Bound conferences are welcome to attend!

Moderator: Susanne Alexander, Goose Lane Editions
Noah Genner, BookNet Canada
Alex Liot, Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association

This panel session is co-hosted by the Atlantic Publishers' Marketing Association  and the Atlantic Provinces Library Association. Delegates of both the APLA and East Bound conferences are welcome to attend!

Moderator: Stephanie Tobin, CBC NL
Dyan Bader, Nova Scotia Provincial Library
Bonnie Morgan, Newfoundland & Labrador Public Libraries
Rebecca Rose, Breakwater Books Ltd.

This panel session is co-hosted by the Atlantic Publishers' Marketing Association  and the Atlantic Provinces Library Association. Delegates of both the APLA and East Bound conferences are welcome to attend!

Moderator: James Lorimer, Formac Publishing
Jenny Benedict, West Vancouver Memorial Library
Cynthia Gatto, Halifax Public Libraries
Dominique Lemieux, Maison de la littérature

Open to all alumni from Dalhousie University's School of Information Management: https://www.dal.ca/faculty/management/school-of-information-management.html 

In the academic world there is intensifying interest in the creation and maintenance of online professional identities. Academic librarians must work through how to match that interest with services and use of library resources and expertise. Interest in this form of identity rests not just with individual researchers wanting to establish and track their own scholarly output for funding, promotion and publication but with administrators seeking reliable data to measure research impact of a department, faculty or university as a whole.

Key areas of expertise render librarians as natural supports for this critical aspect of scholarly communications. We are able to provide support for the effective use and maintenance of tools intended to allow researchers to create unique professional identities. This includes awareness of existing and emerging tools and services; the purpose, unique features, and limitations of each; and how they potentially fit into a broader picture of scholarly communications. In pursuit of this goal, we have engaged in educational programming for liaison librarians as well as webinars and drop-in sessions for researchers.

This session will include a summary of these activities and include explanation of the benefits of ORCiDs, ways to add data to ORCiD profiles, challenges of data from various sources such as Google Scholar and Scopus, and clarifying the relationship between these and other tools, such as social media platforms, repositories, and CRIS systems.

For many the tip of the information iceberg is often only what gets published in academic journals. This belief and practice leaves a vast amount of research and information sitting below the surface on shared drives or industry specific websites. Librarians know there is a world of information below the surface of academia-the world of grey literature that holds equally insightful and valuable clues that impact patients, programs and policies. Librarians, and producers of grey literature know that if it could be accessed consistently it would, in fact, change the way research is published and information is shared. This begs the question; could open access invert the publishing iceberg by bringing insightful grey literature to the surface where it can be found quickly and consistently?
This presentation will talk about the global movement toward open access and will enlighten participants with the latest news and debates regarding open access including Plan S, and the University of California vs Elsevier and how one advocate and supporter of information access sees a new role and skill set for librarians and online libraries in the world of open access.

Increasing recognition of the value of institutional repositories (IRs) over the past fifteen years has led to post-secondary educational institutions of all sizes creating some form of an IR to host the intellectual output of their institutions. However, the feasibility and sustainability of implementing IRs, particularly when using open source (OS) IR software, has been mostly explored by larger post-secondary institutions; the experiences of small academic institutions using OS IRs has been unexplored, save for individual case studies.

Given that post-secondary institutions in Atlantic Canadian are predominantly under 10,000 FTE and thus considered small institutions, the question of how Atlantic Canadian OS IRs compare to the rest of Canada is ripe for exploration. By breaking down the work involved in maintaining an OS IR--staffing, technical support, budgeting, and more--the unique challenges and successes of our regional IRs can be better understood. This presentation will explore the results of a research project conducted in Spring 2018, wherein Canadian post-secondary institutions were surveyed about their experiences using open source institutional repository software. Preliminary results were presented at Open Repositories, and now the experiences of repositories in Atlantic Canada are the focus.

Overall, Atlantic Canada is on par with the rest of Canada with regards to addressing the needs of an IR and of using OS software, but there are a few challenges felt more keenly in the region: smaller budgets, less experienced staff, concerns about the usability of OS IR software, and more. This presentation will examine those challenges and the underlying reasons for why we’ve excelled in some areas and are struggling with others, all with the goal of generating discussion about the opportunities available to Atlantic Canadian post-secondary IRs in order to improve our practices.

Research Data Management (RDM) is becoming an increasingly important issue for post-secondary institutions. The Tri-Agencies (SSHRC, NSERC, CIHR) are expected to release a new policy that will stipulate that institutions have an institutional strategy for dealing with research data. Part of the responsibility will lie with researchers and the management of their research data.

Three Atlantic universities are aiming to discover how researchers are storing, using and sharing their data through administering a survey using an instrument that has been used at many Canadian universities. Surveys will be administered in Winter 2019. Data from the surveys will be analyzed separately by each institution and may be combined to identify commonalities and possibilities for collaboration in the region.

The results of these surveys will help librarians, IT specialists, data managers, and others interested in data management to understand current practices and attitudes. The results will also be used to contribute of the development of RDM services and resources across Atlantic post-secondary institutions with the aim of being prepared for the Tri-Agency policy once it comes into effect.

Open Access has been a fixture of scholarly communications for some time now, albeit one that is still subsumed with considerable misinformation and mystery. In keeping with the conference theme, this panel will consider to what degree the current state of Open Access in academic libraries is just the tip of the iceberg and what progress or changes we might expect in coming years. Featuring five academic librarians from different institutions throughout Atlantic Canada, each panelist will discuss the services and receptiveness for Open Access at their respective institutions, as well as future prospects for Open Access in the Atlantic region and beyond.

Open to all members of the Atlantic Provinces Library Association.

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.