Please join the 2018 BC Library Conference Planning Committee and the BCLA Board of Directors in welcoming three exceptional Keynote Speakers for the 2018 BC Library Conference.
Opening Keynote: Amal Rana, Collaboratively Creating Transformative Change
Weaving together insights from her experiences as a queer, mixed race, Muslim feminist, Amal’s talk will explore how we can collectively create deeply transformative change and build solidarity with each other to not just survive but also find new ways to thrive in increasingly challenging times.
Amal Rana is a queer, mixed race, Pakistani Performance Poet, Educator and Muslim futurist who weaves together community narratives across cultures, languages and generations.
Amal has given talks and performed poetry in various cities, from New York and Toronto to Porto Alegre and Cape Town. In a time when even exhaling while being Muslim seems to have become a crime, she sees poetry as a catalyst for collective liberation.
Hot Topics: Sandra Mathison – Superheroes are what we need: The complexity of evaluating libraries and library services
On the surface, most human endeavors seem simple. We mean to do something often because we value certain things and not others, we have certain resources, and we wonder how well we did in the end. In reality, most human endeavors are complex and often open to multiple interpretations. Libraries and library services are a human endeavor of just this sort. On the surface, the endeavor seems relatively simple. Identify needs of users, develop strategies for meeting those needs and determine how well we did so and/or describe our resources available for users. This framework is common in evaluation and especially in human endeavors where there are “consumers” or “clients” or “users.” But the library world is considerably more complex, with multiple stakeholders vying for their potentially competing needs to be met and new ways in which library resources and services are connected to broad social issues. And so, evaluation of libraries and library services needs also to be much more complex. Evaluators need to step up and be as heroic in their efforts as libraries and librarians are in theirs. This complexity will be better served if evaluation considers 1) whose interests ought to be considered and in what measure and 2) realistic, accurate, contemporary understandings of library resources and services.
Sandra Mathison is Professor of Education at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on educational evaluation and especially on the potential and limits of evaluation to support democratic ideals and promote justice in education. Her research focuses in large part on the intended and unintended consequences of government mandated high stakes testing on teachers, students and quality of education. She is co-author (with Melissa Freeman) of Researching Children’s Experiences. She was Editor-in-Chief of New Directions for Evaluation and is currently co-editor of Critical Education and a member of the Institute for Critical Education Studies. She is the Executive Director of the Institute for Public Education – BC, a research think tank focusing on public education in British Columbia.
Closing Keynote, Chris Bourg: Libraries are not neutral; neither are we
Libraries are not neutral institutions. They provide services and resources to their communities, based on a set of professional values that promote democracy, access, and social justice. Those of us who work in libraries, as social beings, are likewise not neutral. While some library leaders try to keep their political and social agendas separate from their work, others see them as inextricably intertwined. In this talk, Chris Bourg will describe her attempt to bring an explicitly feminist agenda to library leadership, and her belief that libraries can and should promote social justice.
Chris Bourg is the Director of Libraries at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she also has oversight of the MIT Press. Prior to assuming her role at MIT, Chris worked for 12 years in the Stanford University Libraries, most recently as the Associate University Librarian for Public Services. Before Stanford, she spent 10 years as an active duty U.S. Army officer, including three years on the faculty at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Chris is a member of the Steering Committee of SocArXiv, a new open access platform for social science research, and is currently co-chairing an MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research. She is a member of the Board of Directors for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers Committee to Visit the University Library. Chris recently co-chaired an MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on the Future of Libraries, and just completed a term as Chair of the Committee on Diversity and Inclusion of the Association of Research Libraries.
Chris has written and spoken extensively on the future of research libraries, diversity and inclusion in higher education, and the role libraries play in advancing social justice and democracy. She received her BA from Duke University, her MA from the University of Maryland, and her MA and PhD in sociology from Stanford.
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2018 BC Library Conference Planning Committee Co-Chairs
Heidi Schiller
Leanna Jantzi
Anne O’Shea
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Hope to see you there!
Annette DeFaveri
Executive Director
British Columbia Library Association