Meet Trevor Smith (he/him), who will be teaching LIBR 574 Project Management in Information Organizations in Winter Term 2!
Where do you work outside of teaching at UBC iSchool, and how do you bring your professional experiences/expertise into the classroom?
I am the Monograph Acquisitions Librarian at Douglas College, and formerly the Metadata Librarian as well. I also teach for Library Juice on Access, Excel, and Open Refine.
I like to bring practical work problems to the classroom to help prepare students for the challenges they will face in libraries and archives. I remind them that when they start working, they won’t be writing many essays, but I guarantee that a project will either land on their desk or they will create one. I’ve done around 2 to 3 distinct projects every year since I became a librarian and all of them offered new challenges. It is these different projects that I bring to class to get students thinking about what they will encounter on the job.
What’s your favourite thing about teaching at UBC iSchool?
I love being reminded of all the different parts of project management. Teaching the course every year, I need to remind myself of all the different parts of the process because otherwise I would only remember the pieces I needed in my last work project.
Having taught the class for almost a decade, I love running into my former students as so many of them are grateful that the class gave them a firm understanding of the projects they would need to do at work and to not feel intimidated by them.
What’s a fun fact about you?
So many fun facts to choose from. I’m a Cub Scout leader. My sister is also a librarian. I also have an MA in History. I worked on the railway. I worked at a startup. My daughter was born on the first day of my final term at SLAIS — best reason I ever had for missing class and best motivation for getting a job when I finished!
