Generative artificial intelligence has become a crucial topic in the library and information science field over the past year. The use of tools that leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) is rapidly disrupting practices in content creation and information retrieval, and it is urgent to test this technology’s potential impacts in the context of libraries’ user-centred services like reference, instruction, and research support.This session will present an overview of the work done to date...

In the Canadian context, there is a notable dearth of professional literature focusing on racial minority librarians conducted by racial minority librarians. To address this gap, a team of six  librarians, representing the Visible Minority Librarians of Canada (ViMLoC) network, undertook a second comprehensive survey in 2021, building on the initial survey conducted in 2013. The 2021 survey, which included data from 162 minority librarians, served as the foundation for three peer-reviewe...

Sex – and media that depicts sex and sexually suggestive subject matter – remains stigmatised in western society. As pornography and sexually explicit material more broadly have become of increasing interest to researchers across several disciplines such as pornography studies and gender and sexuality studies, so too does the demand on institutions and practitioners in libraries, archives, and special collections to provide access to these materials. However, the taboo associated with the sub...

We are performing a citation analysis of scholarly articles published in two Canadian public policy and public administration journals across five, one-year periods: 1994, 2004, 2009, 2014 and 2019.Our main focus has been differentiating between citations to government sources and those to traditional academic literature and grey literature. Within the government sources we have differentiated between Canadian federal, non-federal and international sources, documents and records, and o...

This presentation will explore a collection, or rather an absence of collection, of moving image works in a Canadian academic institution. Between March 2020 and March 2022, faculty at Concordia University requested over 2,000 films in streaming format to be purchased or licensed by the university library for course and research use. Approximately one third of these requests were unable to be fulfilled due to licensing and rights limitations. Funded by the Concordia University Library Researc...

As of April 2022, the National Library of Medicine has converted to automatic indexing for MEDLINE citations thanks to the integration of The Medical Text Indexer (MTI). MTI has been incredibly impactful, with a notable decrease in the time it takes a MEDLINE citation to receive MeSH indexing. However, further work is needed to address some well-documented issues around the indexing genes and chemical compounds and their impact on information retrieval. To investigate these issues, this resea...

Presentation by Keynote speaker, Aaron Johnson

When Jesuits returned to Canada in the 1840s, searching for and consolidating records that had been left behind in the aftermath of the suppression of their order in 1773 was a top priority. In addition to this work, Félix Martin, S.J.—the first archivist of the Jesuits in Canada—and subsequent archivists set out to copy records about New France held in Europe. Through this process, the Jesuits sought to build a coherent narrative of their order in Canada, and a sense of continuity with their...

Archival documents have become a point of distinction between Canadian universities, where the privileging of electronic resources had led to a homogenization of materials available across institutions. Unique research collections laden with primary source resources are points of distinction between universities and form an important part of the research landscape in higher education.University-based repositories work to build unique collections that respond to the needs and interest o...

This study aimed to compare the bibliographic record duplication rates between books published in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada and identify the causes of duplicate records in OCLC WorldCat. The aim was also to illustrate the causes of duplicate records with examples, taking the opportunity to review earlier cataloging standards and identify common pitfalls. There was an attempt to rank the causes in order by most impactful with the intention of informing cataloging practi...

Dans l’ouvrage « Pour une histoire des femmes bibliothécaires au Québec » , les auteurs et autrice écrivent que « malgré une présence marquée au cours du siècle dernier…, les femmes bibliothécaires ont très peu fait l’objet de recherche au Québec » (Lajeunesse et al., 2020). Dans cette communication, je voudrais contribuer à l’étude des bibliothécaires québécoises et canadiennes en produisant des données sur leur présence dans Wikidata, Wikipédia ainsi que dans des ouvrages sur l’histoire des...

The Library of Parliament catalogues material in English and French, using three controlled vocabularies for subject analysis (LCSH, CSH and RVM). In 2021, Library and Archives Canada began revising Canadian Subject Headings for describing material with Indigenous content. This presentation will cover the work undertaken by the Library of Parliament's Information Description team to implement these changes at the Library of Parliament, both from a policy and from a technical perspective. It w...