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Library + Archives Commitments and Progress

This site includes documentation of the actions the ECU Library and Archives is taking to fulfill our strategic goals, including decolonization and indigenization, accessibility, and sustainability.

Library Committee Reports

  • The Community Engagement committee started in May 2023 
  • We started by asking ourselves a series of questions: Who is our community? Do we want to better serve our existing community, or do we want to expand our community relationships to new people outside the university? How do we identify community needs? How do we address these needs? How can we collaborate with other ECU community groups? How can we make our space more welcoming? 
  • We then started planning community events such as Community Day, Student Orientation, Climate Action Month, Book Sales, and Tea and Cookie events 
  • Community Day events are intended to connect Emily Carr students with organizations in the community, both within and outside ECU, that may be useful to them. These organizations include Student Services, the Aboriginal Gathering Place and the Writing Centre within ECU, and the Vancouver Public Library, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Vancouver Tenants Union outside the school. 
  • Early in 2024 we came up with a set of event promotion guidelines to make sure that community members know about our events. We also strategized how to better reach students through ECU’s communications networks. 
  • We updated our events planning strategy to program participatory events in the first month or two of the semester while students are not as busy, then plan passive displays and critical information in the third month, and destressing and future planning in the fourth month of the semester. 
  • We started planning monthly staff picks displays to keep our library space fresh and inspiring 
  • We implemented several events series such as board games sessions and 16mm film workshops as well as a social media video series to try to engage the student community and address their various needs. We also helped to facilitate programming organized by other committees such as Climate Action Month organized by the Sustainability Committee. 
  • We set up a free community-based tea station at our service desk to help mitigate food scarcity and economic burdens faced by students and staff, and to help build community 

Decolonizing description

  • Hosted a UBC student from Jan - April 2024 to research, propose, and pilot:
    • Criteria for applying the local subject heading Indigenous Creator to book records
    • Workflow for enhancing the metadata of and reclassifying books
    • Workflow for handling potential contestations of how books have been classified or described
  • Implemented the proposed workflow from May 2024 onwards
  • Hosted a UBC student from Oct 2024 - Feb 2025 to
    • Conduct enhancement and reclassification work
    • Evaluate the workflows and propose ways to streamline
  • 42 books were reclassified and metadata enhanced in 2024
  • Added Indigenous Creators sub-page to the Collections Libguide
  • Research visit to MoA Library in August 2024 to learn about their reclassification project.
    • We will reference the alternative list of authority terms that MOA used if we can’t find in the GVPL list. MOA is a pilot site for the NIKLA respectful terminology project. They got a grant to build an ontology.
    • An emergent idea for classification is to
  • Watched and discussed conference presentations to identify concordances with other work done and identify ideas that can be incorporated into current workflow or future plans, e.g. adding language codes from ISO 639-3 due to MARC language codes being limited; including podcasts in the catalogue;

Other Work and Events

  • Hosted a Data Colonialism talk with Vanessa Gray in March 2024
  • Added indigenous language resources to Indigenous Topics LibGuide
  • Designed and put up posters advertising the Indigenous Topics LibGuide around the library and campus
  • Window signage project
    • Researched native plants outside library windows
    • Created a LibGuide page with plant information and photos of plants in different seasons
    • Acquired plant map from Facilities
    • Text vinyls with Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and hǝn̓q̓ǝmin̓ǝm̓ names for native plants printed and put up on windows 
  • Hired grad student Morgan Martino as a sustainability and climate action RA. Morgan ran a series of mending workshops, created a mending kit and a mending libguide, and recommended a list of mending-related books for acquisition. 
  • We started hosting a fibre library, part of a network of free textile materials throughout the city, as well as a monthly knit night facilitated by the fibre library organizers 
  • We continued facilitating the Roots Union Garden and Seed Swap as well as the Supplies Swap and the ECU Facebook Buy Nothing Group 
  • We shared Sustainability Bingo with the School and shared carbon reduction tips on Instagram
  • We participated in Plastic Free July focusing on reducing our plastic waste from food in the library and we shared plastic reduction tips on Instagram 
  • We participated in a Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians (CAPAL) conference panel on the topic of climate engagement 
  • We joined the newly formed CAPAL climate action CoP 
  • We participated in a sweetgrass harvesting workshop hosted by the AGP 
  • We took part in a BCLA Climate Action Benchmarking survey 
  • We participated in Climate Action Week extending it to a full month and offered events such as a bike repair workshop, a movie mending night, and a digital carbon footprint delete-a-thon in which participants were given tips on how to clear their Outlook accounts and Google Drive and encouraged to delete unneeded documents. We also shared a whiteboard where community members could share their thoughts on climate change. 
  • We expanded our messaging about the climate emergency to include the biodiversity crisis which is interconnected with the climate crisis but not acknowledged often enough 
  • In collaboration with faculty member Laura Kozak, we helped to organize a tour of the Capilano Watershed led by Squamish ethnobotanist Senaqwila Wyss 
  • We published a sustainability page on the library and archives commitment and progress report, outlining work the sustainability committee has done since its inception 
  • We expanded the materials we except for recycling to include items such as pens 
  • We attended a climate cafe training webinar and session run by Climate Cafe NYC  
  • We piloted our window and pillar signage identifying native species in the garden outside the library 

2024

We continued to provide a low-barrier space for individual and group exhibitions including ECU classes. In 2024 there were 15 exhibitions in the library, many had opening/closing parties and we saw a lot of engagement with the works 

We streamlined our exhibitions workflows and communications with exhibiting artists to make it easier to organize exhibitions and install work. For example, we created a form to share with artists to collect necessary information for didactics rather than having to email back and forth. 

We reviewed and updated our internal documents related to library exhibitions procedures, best practices, and guidelines. For example, we reviewed our guidelines on sensitive content in exhibitions, and we streamlined our group exhibition best practices.  

We amended our exhibitions agreement so that students are aware of the copyright implications of sharing their work on Instagram. We also added expectations on picking up artwork after it has been de-installed so that work doesn’t end up getting discarded against the student’s wishes. 

With help from Yang, we added partition walls for hanging artwork in the library. These walls are available for use most of the year but are removed from the library during grad show, and occasionally during other large shows. 

We cleared space on our mezzanine to make it more conducive to larger group exhibitions 

We created a spreadsheet to help track upcoming exhibitions and vitrine loans making our workflow more efficient 

We made it easier for students to display work for longer so that the work of installing and deinstalling feels more worthwhile 

We limited the number of large group exhibitions happening simultaneously so that exhibitions remain manageable, do not interfere with student workspace, or create noise problems when groups are installing 

We moved all exhibition celebrations to the upper level of the library so that they do not bother students working quietly on the lower level 

We continued to increase flexibility in accommodating temporary student displays such as the yearbook display 

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