Location: Education South, Room 122, University of Alberta

9:00 – 9:10: Opening Remarks

9:10 – 9: 40: Karen Ranalletta and Susanne Lester “Association of University and College Employees 1- UBC: The Union Born in the Library and Will Live on in the Library!”

Presenter Bio: Karen Ranalletta is the President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees local 2950, and a library worker from the Irving K Barber Learning Centre at UBC. She is a General Vice President of CUPE BC and a Vice President of the BC Federation of Labour. She chairs the CUPE BC Library Committee and co-chairs the CUPE National Library Workers Committee.

Susanne Lester is the 2nd Vice President of Canadian Union of Public Employees local 2950. She has been working at the UBC Library since 1969 as a reference assistant (government documents). She was a member of both the union’s organizing committee and the first contract committee.   

9:40 – 10:10: [Due to unforeseen circumstances, Jeannine will not be joining us.]

Jeannine Berroteran “Vocational Awe, Librarianship, and the Blinding of the Critical Eye”

Presenter Bio: Jeannine Berroteran, MLS, independent scholar and researcher, has over 15 years of employment experience in several areas of academic librarianship and she has volunteered in public libraries in both Ohio and Minnesota.  She has contributed chapters and articles for anthologies on volunteering in libraries and assessment in academic librarianship.

10:10 – 10:40: Emma Scott “Why Do We Negotiate”

Presenter Bio: Emma Scott is a professional librarian and the liaison for the sciences at the University of Lethbridge. Within her role Emma is currently involved in research projects focused on the negotiation behaviour of academic librarians in Canada and assessing student learning about information and access to information in the global context.

10:40 – 11:00: Break

11:00 – 11:30: Sharon Farnel and Bob Cole “Toiling in the Digital Factory: Competing Modes of Production in the Manufacture of Digital Collections”

Presenter Bio: Robert Cole is a metadata librarian and bibliographer at the University of Alberta Library. Before joining the Library in 2002, he worked as a researcher and copy editor for an Edmonton multimedia company.

Sharon Farnel is Metadata Coordinator at the University of Alberta Libraries and a PhD Candidate at the University of Alberta. In her doctoral research, she is working with the Inuvialuit Cultural Centre in Inuvik to develop a community driven metadata framework for their digital library of cultural resources.

11:30 – 12:00: Jessica Leslie “This is a Man’s World: Feminist Pedagogical Practices in Primarily Male Classrooms”

Presenter Bio: Jessica Leslie is an Instruction Librarian at SAIT. Jessica’s pronouns are she/her/hers. She is new to Calgary and new to her role but is eager to learn as much as she can about both.

12:00 – 12:30: Lydia Zvyagintseva and Mary Greenshields “Feminist but not Feminized: The Politics of Labour in Academic Library Technology”

Presenter Bio: Lydia is the Head of Digital Scholarship Services at the University of Alberta Libraries, where she is responsible for the operations and service design of the Digital Scholarship Centre. Lydia’s research interests include digital pedagogy, theories of learning, and interdisciplinary perspectives on power and social relations. 

Mary is a settler librarian at the University of Lethbridge where she teaches Library Science for the First Nations’ Transition Program. In addition to being the liaison to that program, First Nations Governance, and Indigenous Studies, Mary’s research interests are currently focused on libraries as potential spaces and sites for social justice.

12:30 – 1:15: Lunch (not provided)

1:15 – 1:45: Adena Brons, Ean Henninger, Chloe Riley and Crystal Yin“The Awe-ful Spectre of Precarity”

Presenter Bio: Ean Henninger is an early-career librarian currently straddling the public-academic divide. His research interests include applied linguistics and labor issues in libraries, and he is also seeking coauthors for a case study of Janet from The Good Place as reflecting popular discourses on information intermediaries.

Adena Brons currently works at Simon Fraser University as a liaison librarian. She has previously worked at UBC Library and the New Westminster Public Library. Her research interests include labour and equity issues in libraries. 

Chloe Riley is a Research Commons Librarian at SFU Library. Her research interests include labour in libraries, equity and social justice issues in academic libraries, and programming and services for graduate students.

Crystal Yin currently works as a liaison librarian at SFU Library, and her research interests include area studies, science education and labour issues in libraries.

1:45 – 2:15: Joel Blechinger “Wages for Intern Work and Quarters for Keystrokes: An Exploration of Unpaid Labour within the Context of ‘Free’ Digital Labour”

Presenter Bio: Joel Blechinger is a second-year student in the University of Alberta’s combined Digital Humanities/Master of Library and Information Studies program with research interests in librarianship’s vocational history, media theory, postcolonial and queer interrogations of information organization systems, and the philosophy of information.

2:15 – 2:45: Brandy Mowatt and Michael B. McNally “A Demand Side Analysis of Precarity in the Canadian Academic Library Labour Market”

Presenter Bio: Brandy Mowatt has been working as a head librarian in international schools in the Middle East and Japan. Despite her regular duties, she still manages to find time to continue to pursue academic research as well as visual art and tabletop gaming. 

Michael B. McNally is an associate professor at the School of Library and Information Studies with ongoing interests in labour in LIS. 

2:45 – 3:30: Panel Discussion – “Labour, Precarity and Librarianship” – Panelists:  Samantha Allan , Joel Blechinger, Michelle De Agostini, Kayla Lar-son, and Lorisia MacLeod

Panelist Info: This year’s panelists are all recent graduates of the MLIS program at the University of Alberta.

3:30 – 3:45: Break

3:45 – 4:30: Break Out Discussions and Final Discussion

4:30 – 4:45: Concluding Remarks