The availability of think tank literature in Canadian academic libraries

Introduction: Think tanks are in the business of creating innovative ideas to address policy issues, which are disseminated through timely, well-researched publications made available for free or at a nominal cost. In 2007, L. DeLong published “Do think tanks matter to libraries?” which revealed “if not surprising, rather unsettling” results of the absence of this literature in Canadian library [...]

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Citation Analysis: Measuring impact and delivering value to your organization

At many non-profit and for-profit companies, it is important to measure the reach, influence, and success of the organization’s efforts. This is not always easy and sometimes not even feasible, but when quantification is possible, it should be carried out to gauge the impact of a task on an audience. This is often done through [...]

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Curating my Facebook profile

Facebook has been a household name for a few years, and by now, most people have their own profile. However, lately I’ve noticed that a growing number of users are choosing to deactivate or severely limit the content of their accounts. This got me thinking about my own Facebook presence… I remember when I first [...]

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Librarians & online content

I read something online recently that made my heart beat faster, and I felt that I had to get this out of my system. There’s a popular idea that because things can (and increasingly do) exist electronically, that the need for classification (and in a way, librarians) are not required or are becoming unnecessary. Please, [...]

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Learning from relatives: academic, school, and public libraries

Librarians and information professionals who work in special libraries often stick together. This makes sense, of course, as they tend to serve like-minded users, provide similar information services, and face challenges unique to special libraries. Librarians in corporate, non-profit, law and “non-traditional” information centres must rarely (if ever) consider some of the fundamental and everyday [...]

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Professional Profiles Series

Recently I was interviewed by the President of the SLA-Toronto Student Group, Zoe Cliff.  Zoe asked if we could meet to chat about my career in special libraries for for their blog’s professional profiles series. I thought it would be neat to share some insight into job hunting, my experiences in libraries, and landing a [...]

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“less sane” core library services

This past week I attended the OLA’s annual Super Conference in Toronto. The sessions that I chose were kind of split between disappointing, and terrific. I never think that I’ll love everything I attend, so it was to be expected. Especially coming from a special library, I’m not exactly the target audience for the OLA [...]

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Solo Librarians & Twitter

Many libraries nowadays have Twitter to promote themselves to the public and their users, but what about how librarians are using Twitter for themselves. If you’re a librarian, I want to know: do you have a personal/professional Twitter account? If your answer is ‘yes’, then I also want to ask: do you ever use Tweets [...]

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Access 2010 (i.e. #accesswpg)

Access, e.g. “the premier library technology conference in Canada”, was a hit this year in Winnipeg. From October 13-16, librarians, programmers, developers, technicians, and some eager job-seekers gathered in the sublime and historic Fort Garry Hotel to share ideas and experiences on functionality, open source alternatives, innovative service technologies, and most of all, access! This [...]

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Re-evaluating knowing “too much about too little”

Are the most desirable reference and research librarians ones who are subject-experts, or those who have excellent broad knowledge in many areas (i.e. generalists)? Lately I’ve heard a number of opinions on the debatable impediments of subject specialization (see Pereyaslavska’s article in The Courier, re: “being overqualified”), along with the advantages of being a generalist [...]

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