Image courtesy of BCLA
The 2024 BC Library Association (BCLA) Conference was hosted in Vancouver in April and two of cIRcle’s team members were in attendance. This annual conference brings together information professionals and students from across the province to discuss ideas and issues in the world of librarianship. The 2024 conference’s central themes were commitment, courage, and community. A commemorative zine created as part of a conference session shows how these themes connect to the experiences of library workers across BC.
In this blog post, cIRcle’s attendees share their key takeaways and experiences attending the conference.
Jillian’s Conference Takeaways
Hello friends! My name is Jillian, and I’m the Research Assistant at cIRcle. As a BCLA newbie, I was excited about (and perhaps slightly intimidated by) the wide range of discussions, and so I challenged myself to attend at least one presentation with a subject I knew nothing about (enter artificial intelligence). In the end, I attended four fascinating sessions about reciprocity and truth-telling, student engagement, interdepartmental collaboration, and, yes, artificial intelligence (AI). Even though the presentations I attended featured seemingly disparate topics I observed among them common themes that demonstrated a commitment to community engagement.
What do University Canada West (UCW) librarians teaching a Learning for Success course have in common with University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) librarians implementing a seed bank initiative? Both endeavoured to build community by engaging in reciprocal relationships with their patrons. At UCW, librarians collaborated with learning coordinators and professors to create an academic preparedness course that demystified the library for over 3,000 students. In UFV’s case, library staff regularly met with student groups to hear what programs and initiatives students wanted to see in their library.
As I continue my work with cIRcle, and begin my career as an information professional, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to reflect on these ideas. The world and work of librarianship is so much more expansive than I thought when I began my MLIS (UFV librarians, for instance, created a seed bank with their students— so cool!!); I hope that by continuing to build engaged communities, we can imagine new possibilities and futures together.
Kelly’s Conference Takeaways
My name is Kelly, and I am cIRcle’s Digital Repository Specialist. I was keen to attend the BCLA Conference in person this year, after having attended the BCLA virtual conferences in 2021 and 2022. With the themes of commitment, courage, and community, I knew that the conference sessions would offer valuable insights into how libraries across BC are fostering community engagement and caring for the people who enliven their spaces – readers, students, and information professionals. I attended sessions that discussed supporting reconciliation in library spaces and events, strategies for improving accessibility of library collections and activities, and the development of creation spaces (also called maker spaces) within libraries. Conference speakers shared many valuable resources for getting started, including the Accessible Libraries learning paths, the Indigenous Design Charter, and the Sustainable Libraries Initiative.
Each of the sessions I attended was framed around the idea of starting points – one of the key takeaways I left the conference with was the idea of starting somewhere, if only just to start. Many of the speakers I listened to spoke of their desire to start small and scale up accordingly. Topics like reconciliation, accessibility, and climate change can’t be viewed as projects to be done start to finish, so the idea of starting small with one practical change is a good reminder that any work we do now becomes the foundation for future work. I left the conference with a notebook full of ideas and plans for new and expanded cIRcle Office projects. I am looking forward to sharing our starting points in the blog in the coming months.