LIBR 596 - UBC School of Social Work

Organization
North Fraser Métis Association (NFMA)

Location
To be determined

Co-supervised by

• Jennifer Douglas, Assoc. Professor, iSchool (Library, Archival and Information Studies) Faculty of Arts and MAS Program Chair
• Alexandra Peck, Asst. Professor, Art History, Visual Art & Theory and Audain Chair in Historical Indigenous Art

Purpose of the project:

The purpose of the project is to support the North Fraser Métis Association (NFMA) in gathering, documenting and curating a collection of ~200 carvings and assorted media of artist Vaughn David (e.g. images, websites, video recordings, carving notes, artistic summaries, interviews, etc). The end goal is to create an overall plan to support a curated exhibit of the artist’s work. This work will be done collaboratively as part of a student group (including 2 or more FNCC students and one undergraduate student in Art History). The student(s) will gain experience with project co-design and management in cataloguing a specific Métis artist’s craft and legacy. The project will culminate with a secondary Art History project to curate select pieces for an exhibition at the AHVA Gallery at the Audain Art Centre.  The North Fraser Métis Association provides cultural stewardship and project oversight for the collection and associated materials.

Summary of activities required to carry out the project:

Orientation and project preparation:

• Meeting with North Fraser Métis Association for project goals and orientation
• Course pre- or co-requisites Information Practice and Protocols in Support of Indigenous Initiatives (LIBR 564 / ARST 585), and Personal and Community Archives (ARST 535)
• (Optional, at students’ discretion) Build relationship with Vaugh David community: artistic and familial connections as recommended by NFMA
• Co-design project plan and team charter to work within a group of supervisor(s) and other student team members
• Build an item database: collection pieces, brief description, location, care notes, item transport and storage, media pieces

Items gathering, care and documentation, working closely with the NFMA:

• Identifying the roles of recordkeeping and archive-making, the role to support, represent and make space for this knowledge sharing
• Systematic outreach, coordination and logistics of locating and re-locating carvings and items to central/accessible project location
• Work with NFMA, members of their community, and the Art History team member to create detailed object descriptions and care notes for individual items (primary interviews involved)
• Gathering, sorting, naming and extracting relevant information from various (video) media files and cataloguing these as pertaining to individual carvings within the Archive
• Reflect on the information and stories gathered and design way to present as an Archive
• Organize and document the archive to reflect the artist’s inspiration, technical craft and legacy in the Métis carving community; some of this work will be in collaboration with an Art History undergraduate team member for the purpose of next project sub-item

Curation of select items for exhibition:

• Support Art History undergraduate team member in curating select items for exhibition
• Prepare for working with NFMA videographer – generational and knowledge capture

Documentation:

• Project outline and care plan to scope out the full project
• Final report on the work completed for the NFMA
• Career scoping – role of project within the umbrella of GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) – blueprint for curation activities across the full project

Expectations of the end result of the project, for both host and student:

The student will gain experience building a relationship and working with a Métis Nation; project design and management; coordination, logistics and cataloguing of a specific artist’s works; supporting curation of select items for exhibition.

The North Fraser Métis Association can expect to have a fully itemized, (chronologically) documented and curated archive of Vaughn David for the David family and wider community.

The project will follow Indigenous data governance and cultural protocol principles regarding the stewardship and use of Métis cultural knowledge and archival materials.

Time periods in which the project could be supervised:

• Summer Session, Term 2 (July-August): project orientation and preparation (20 hours)
• Winter Session, Term 1 (September-December): conclude project plan and perform gathering and documentation (60 hours)
• Winter Session, Term 2 (January-April): conclude archiving and support curation of select pieces; prepare project report (40 hours)
• NOTE: these are projections of time allocation and the FNCC students can adjust as deemed optimal and appropriate with their schedules/time management

Is there a deadline by which the project must be completed?

To be determined

Considering the project requirements, please suggest suitable coursework as pre-requisite or co-requisite:

Preference for students who have completed/are enrolled in:

• LIBR 564/ARST 585 Information Practice and Protocols in Support of Indigenous Initiatives
• ARST 535 Personal and Community Archives

Applications will be assessed on a rolling basis

Organization
University of Toronto Scarborough Library

Address
This is a remote position.
1265 Military Trail
Toronto, ON M1C 1A4
Canada
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Supervising Librarian/Archivist
Name: Kirsta Stapelfeldt

Purpose of the project:

The purpose of this project is to make early Canadian newspapers easier to read, search, and use for research and learning. Many of these newspapers have been digitized, but the text is often hard to work with due to errors from optical character recognition (OCR). This project focuses on improving that text and organizing it in ways that make it more useful.

At the same time, the project gives students hands-on experience working with historical sources and digital tools. You’ll learn how to clean and interpret messy data, think critically about how information is recorded and represented, and contribute to a real library collection that others will use for research and teaching.

Summary of activities required to carry out the project:

Students in this practicum will work with digitized newspaper pages and OCR-generated text, improving its accuracy and structure so it can be more easily searched and analyzed. This includes reviewing and correcting transcription errors using tools such as ScribeOCR, with particular attention to names, places, and historically specific terms.

Depending on the focus of the placement, students may also work with extracted named entity data, verifying references against the original newspaper images and conducting historical research to clarify, standardize, and enrich information about people, places, and organizations.

Across both streams, students will follow established workflows, document their decisions, and participate in discussions about transcription practices, data quality, and the interpretive nature of working with historical materials. Their contributions will directly support the development of the library’s digital newspaper collections.

Expectations of the end result of the project, for both host and student:

By the end of the practicum, students will have produced a set of improved and structured materials that can be incorporated into the library’s Early Canadian Newspapers collection. This may include cleaned and corrected transcriptions, verified and standardized named entity data, and brief documentation of decisions or issues encountered during the work. These outputs are intended to be reusable, supporting future research, search functionality, and teaching applications.

For the host, the expectation is that student work will meaningfully advance the quality and usability of the corpus while also helping to test and refine workflows for ongoing and future projects. For students, the expectation is that they will gain practical experience working with historical sources and digital tools, develop skills in transcription, data cleaning, and critical analysis, and leave with a clear understanding of how their contributions fit into a larger research and library infrastructure context.

Time periods in which the project could be supervised:

• Winter Term 1 (September – December)
• Winter Term 2 (January – April)
• Summer Session, Term 1 (May – June)
• Summer Session, Term 2 (July – August)

Is there a deadline by which the project must be completed?

No deadline.

Considering the project requirements, please suggest suitable coursework as pre-requisite or co-requisite:

Students should ideally have completed some of the program’s core foundational courses, particularly those that introduce how information is organized, described, and used in professional contexts. Courses such as LIBR 509 Foundations of Bibliographic Control and LIBR 506 Human Information Interaction would provide a useful baseline, along with ARST 500 Information Technology & Archives for students coming from an archival stream.

As preparation or co-requisites more directly aligned with the practicum work, students would benefit from coursework in metadata and description, such as ARST 562 / LIBR 513 Metadata, as well as ARST 515 Arrangement and Description of Archives. For students engaging more deeply with digital text and OCR workflows, LIBR 582 / ARST 556P Digital Images & Text Collections and LIBR 559N Text Analytics would be helpful, though not strictly required.

More generally, any coursework that introduces database design (LIBR 554 / ARST 554), information retrieval (LIBR 557), or digital libraries (LIBR 581 / ARST 556M) would support the skills developed in this practicum. Because the project involves both historical interpretation and hands-on data work, students from a range of course backgrounds could succeed, but some prior exposure to metadata, digital collections, or archival description will make the experience more productive.

Applications will be assessed on a rolling basis

Organization
Insurance Corporation of British Columbia

Address
151 Esplanade W
North Vancouver, BC V7M 3H9
Canada
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Supervising Librarian/Archivist
Name: Noah Duranseaud

Purpose of the project:

The purpose of this project is the processing of material donated to the Corporate Archives in the course of ICBC’s 50th anniversary celebration and pending Head Office move.

Volume: ~9 banker boxes

Sample formats: photographs, photo albums, brochures, employee recognition letters, corporate brand artifacts, corporate safety campaign artifacts, audiovisual material such as cassettes and CDs, and data storage devices.

Subject matter: donated material represents ICBC’s core business functions (ex. Insurance, Claims, Driver Licensing, Road Safety, Communications, IT, HR).

Summary of activities required to carry out the project:

• Appraising of donated material
• Creating accession reports
• Arranging and rehousing records for preservation and storage
• Writing archival descriptions within ICBC’s enterprise content management system (OpenText Content Server)
• Creating finding aids
• Selectively digitizing and organizing digital records (time permitting)

Expectations of the end result of the project, for both host and student:

Material from throughout ICBC’s history, especially the first few decades, are fully processed. This will preserve key historical records from across the company. The records will be organized and searchable, making them accessible to the corporation.

• Records will be preserved in acid-free containers, including boxes that can be sent to offsite storage locations. This also helps prepare the Records Management team and the donor teams to move to the new Head Office with their records properly inventoried and housed.
• Records will be easy to identify through tools such as finding aids and archival descriptions.

The student will gain experience working in a Corporate Archive within a large organization. They will learn about how corporate functions work and will have exposure to the responsibilities of corporate archivists and records managers.

Time periods in which the project could be supervised:

• Summer Session, Term 1 (May – June)
• Summer Session, Term 2 (July – August)

Is there a deadline by which the project must be completed?

No deadline.

Considering the project requirements, please suggest suitable coursework as pre-requisite or co-requisite:

• Completion of ARST core courses
• ARST 520 Selection & Acquisition of Archival Documents

Applications will be assessed on a rolling basis.