Connecting to Collect: Strengths in Indigenous Language Collections in Canadian Libraries and a Collaborative Path Forward
Wednesday May 22, 2024
From 1:00pm to 1:30pm
Document
Academic libraries have an opportunity and a responsibility to support language revitalization efforts in Indigenous communities, and an opportunity to celebrate the diversity and complexity of these languages in support of research and teaching at our institutions.
While recognizing that collecting Indigenous language materials is vital, we also recognize that doing so ethically and comprehensively requires deep engagement with Indigenous communities. There is a risk that Canada’s academic libraries will gravitate towards the same set of easy-to-acquire materials. In this session, we’ll describe work begun at the University of Toronto Libraries to evaluate language collections across Canada to understand how best to employ our resources and work collaboratively with our library colleagues.
Our team used WorldCat and Statistics Canada data to explore Indigenous language holdings for Canadian university libraries. We created a query for each individual language and institution to get holdings data for dozens of libraries in nearly twenty languages. We then analyzed the data to understand which libraries were strongest in each given language, and how well collection strengths mapped, geographically, to the traditional lands of the people who speak a given language.
With this data, we’ve begun the work of outreach, deciding how best to partner with libraries so individual sites can leverage their strengths to build deep language collections that can be shared across Canada. The goal is a collaborative network of Indigenous language collection development. We hope sharing this project in its early stages will help form partnerships among CRKN libraries.
