BC Library Conference

Presentation for the 3rd Children and Teen Services Conference  (CATS) in Kelowna, B.C. in October.  Discussed all the Disability projects that I have done to help children and teens with diversabilities (disabilities).   Have sent the booklists across Canada for libraries and organizations to use and create their own.  Interior Health, MCYSN, eight school districts and Work B.C. are using them for staff and clients as well as doctors in the province have them on their websites FETCH and PATHWAYS.  Projects were done in my role as  Community Liaison for the provincial LDABC, South Central Okanagan Community Council member  and Self-Advocate Advisor for the Okanagan Self-Advocate Group.  Lists and resources are very highly used and appreciated by the staff, families and professionals across the province and Canada.

This was presented for the 3rd Annual Children and Teen Services Conference (C.A.T.S.) which was located in Kelowna, British Columbia. We had 67 participants from across B.C. and some from Alberta.
The presentation was to encourage other librarians to create their own Diversabilitiy Service Provider lists, and Teen and Children's bookslists, do programming and workshops on this topic in their communities.
All these lists have been sent across Canada. Interior Health, MCYSN, and Work B.C. are using them, as well as Doctors on the provincial website - Divisiont of Family Practice FETCH and PATHWAYS.

Collaboration can be transformative and a key to future success, particularly for smaller libraries/memory organisations. Through collaboration and large-scale systemic design, Arca, BC's collaborative digital repository, creates equity across the province by putting an innovative discovery platform within reach for even the smallest organisations. Attendees of this panel session learnt about the transformative impact of Arca from BC GLAM sector participants who are using Arca to make their digital treasures searchable and accessible to their communities. They heard about the innovative collaboration models for Arca partnerships with the BC History Digitization Program and the Digitized Okanagan History Project.

In this session, accessibility experts working in post-secondary education support organizations will describe simple ways you can be more intentional in designing a library and collections that all of your users can access and use.

How can we make sure our activities and services are truly user-centred?

Members of the BC User Experience Interest Group (BC UXIG) will briefly share highlights and strategies from some recent projects, then lead this lively and active workshop where you'll stretch your imagination and build some UX-perspective muscles.

We’ll give most of the time to lively small-group discussions around challenging assumptions and our own “expert” perspectives to bring a more user-centred approach to what we do. Be prepared to dismantle some of your assumptions!

The BC UXIG is an informal grassroots collection of librarians that has been hosting events and workshops around UX for the past five years, including sessions on wayfinding and Google Analytics.

Stress is becoming a norm and can lead to serious health issues. Library workers are overwhelmed. What role should the library play in ensuring employee wellness? One in five people struggle and mental health is a leading cause of workplace disability in Canada. As a champion for mental health, in 2014 Pickering Public Library (PPL) became early adopters of the voluntary National Standard for Workplace Psychological Health & Safety CSA-Z1003-13. PPL will share their best practices to implement a psychological health and safety system for employees in your library. This session will also share the results of a recent national research case study in which PPL was a participant organization. This session will be of interest to any library employee, especially library leaders, joint health & safety committee members, and staff with human resources or supervisory responsibilities. There will be an audience question period near the end of the session for added interactivity.
Learning objectives:

At the end of this session, participants will be able to:

1. Share experiences as it relates to mental health in the workplace.

2. Examine and obtain a tool kit of practical resources that can be utilized to help their library implement a psychologically healthy and safe workplace.

3. Identify and develop strategies that are suited to their individual workplaces.

Speaker: Tanya Sinclair, Pickering Public Library

Biography:

Tanya Sinclair is the CEO at Pickering Public Library. She has over a decade of experience working in libraries, combined with 20 years in the Human Resources field. Tanya is passionate about learning and is always looking for news ways to engage staff. Tanya’s leadership philosophy is: Lead, Learn, Laugh! Tanya collaborated with the Mental Health Commission of Canada for three years positioning Pickering Public Library as an early adopter of the National Standard for Workplace Psychological Health & Safety. Tanya recently served as a workplace mental health guest panelist for the Conference Board of Canada in 2018.

The increasing cost of post-secondary education is a problem faced by students across our country. Although libraries do not have control over contributors such as rising tuition fees and student debt loads, they can provide some financial relief through their collections. Library collection policies have traditionally been designed to exclude textbooks as items that are purchased. However, in the age of digital, the reasoning behind many of these policies could be called to question. Is it time to begin looking at expanding the library’s role in supporting students with some required course materials? How can we design library collections to support the curricular needs of users, while also balancing shrinking budgets and ensuring the needs of our entire communities are met? Over two semesters, Okanagan College Library saved students more than $110,000 in textbook costs by purchasing electronic versions of required and recommended books through library suppliers and making them available through the Library. Learn about the project and the steps involved, what worked well, and what we would recommend others do differently. 

The City of Vancouver’s public sector innovation lab, called the Solutions Lab, began in January 2017 as a way to grow collaborative leadership through the City’s Healthy City Strategy. The lab is focused on experimentation and learning to develop, test, and scale social innovations that contribute to a healthy and green city by:
• Shifting organizational culture
• Building innovation infrastructure
• Unlocking the potential of people
• Growing authentic partnerships
• Telling stories of change
 
Sponsored by the Public Libraries Interest Group, this session will delve into the landscape of social innovation labs by telling the story of the Solutions Lab, exploring social innovation practices and methodologies, and brainstorming how they might be applied to a library context.
 

Presentation from BCLA 2019 Conference, "Future by Design". Presented Thursday, May 9. Session T01. Presenters: Paola Ardiles, Stephen O'Shea, Jennifer Wile, Tamarack Hockin (contact links provided last slide of presentation).

As managers and supervisors, we often blame individual employees when they disengage or seem to lack motivation. But what if it's not them? What if it's us: the systems, practices and management techniques we use that cause the problem? Awareness of our role in employee disengagement is key to improvement and a happier, more engaged workplace. This conference session will introduce participants to the underlying philosophies that have helped to forge current workplace systems and practices. The session will contrast those philosophies with what we understand now about motivation and employee satisfaction from the latest research on healthy workplaces, and uncover the seemingly innocuous workplace and management practices that demotivate staff and fuel employee disengagement. By understanding what lies at the heart of employee disengagement, we can become better managers and advocates for our departments, our libraries, and ourselves.