The Library and Learning Commons fosters active, close, collaborative working relationships with all of its communities – the College, other post-secondary institutions, the library profession, and Vancouver residents. These community connections were apparent in the various collaborative events hosted this year, as well as fundraising and awareness campaigns spearheaded by library staff.
Indigenization and decolonization work continues at the Library. Library staff and faculty have begun assessing and correcting item classification wherein works by and about Indigenous peoples have often been located with materials in history and ethnographic studies. Additional work is being planned to create an automated system to update subject headings as they come into the system. Due to the scope of this project and the sensitivity of the material, the Library expects this project to be complete in 2024.
With the guidance of our Fine Arts / Art History liaison librarian, many titles by and about Indigenous artists have been more properly located with other art books. This ongoing work involves assessing, re-cataloguing, and reprocessing individual titles.
In 2021-22, the Collections Librarians focused on acquiring more titles by Indigenous LGBTQQIA2S+ authors and increasing the number of Indigenous children's books in our collection. As well, the Library continued to add titles on reconciliation, MMIWG, Indigenous art and artists, traditional ways of knowing, memoirs, and graphic novels. The Indigenous Studies Portal and the Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America are two notable resources the Library added to its collection this past year.
The Library continues to build its media collection with titles relating to Indigenous issues by seeking input from faculty, subject librarians, and proactively considering Indigenous representation (in terms of both content and the creators) when making selections. One recent example is the acquisition of three REDx Talks series, which feature Indigenous elders, activists, artists, and speakers talking on a wide variety of topics.
The Library promotes Indigenous collections to its community in various ways. The Library highlighted resources relating to the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation with a window display in the Library entrance and online in the Library’s Featured Titles guide. Other relevant Featured Titles guides included categories for National Indigenous History Month (June 2021), Aboriginal Law and Rights (November 2021), and Collective Restoration (April 2022).
The Library continued to collaborate with IES for a summer student book club, during which the group read Pemmican Wars, the first volume in the A Girl Called Echo series.
Throughout 2021/22, library staff served on a variety of College committees and working groups, including:
The Library and Open Langara ran the Open Student Scholar Prize for the third time in the spring of 2022. Launched in 2020, this prize celebrates exemplary work being done by Langara students and offers them the opportunity to share their work in an Open Access format. This year, Chloe Bond won the $250 top spot for her essay entitled "A Platonic Analysis of Ursula Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." All winning and honorable mention projects are available in the Open Student Scholar Prize Collection in the Langara Institutional Repository (LaIR).