Catherine Lavallée-Welch Presents a Webinar for the Special Libraries Association

Working in academia for 20 years, Catherine Lavallée-Welch is the University Librarian at BU Library Learning Commons since fall 2018. She also sits on the Board of Directors of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) as President-elect, as well as on the board of directors of the Corporation of Professional Librarians of Quebec.

In the beginning of May, Catherine presented a webinar entitled “Advocacy for the library in higher education” for the Asian Community of the SLA. More than 850 people attended the webinar, mostly from India and other Asian countries, along with attendees from North America and Europe.

During her webinar, she discussed how the promotion and the advocacy in favor of the modern university library must be engaged, factual and systematic to ensure it receives the resources necessary for its success. On the subject of advocacy, Catherine says “Advocacy is everyone’s business at the library. It comprises of a lot of storytelling in fact. I recommend always having an elevator story ready. It’s not the time to be shy or downplay what you do, but to share what exciting thing you’re working on and how your work adds value to the organization. You have permission to brag a little!”. Accordingly, the techniques and methods she suggested during her webinar where rooted in her experiences from her work as an academic library head both in the US and in Canada.

Catherine Lavallée-Welch, who encourages collaboration between librarians and external colleagues, recently received an Interdisciplinary Research Team Grants for archival rescue with collaborators Dr. David Webster of the Department of History and Dr. Claire Grogan of the Department of English. Building on the example of the “Archival Rescue Project” at Carleton University, and the principles underlying the British Library’s Endangered Archives program, they will identify local and international collections in danger of being lost. This work will also involve locating, processing, digitizing and preserving rare published materials, with the goal of making them more broadly available.

The library offers a series of services to assist faculty and students in their research endeavours: collections of materials, both in print and in digital format; research assistance services with librarians; an institutional repository for scientific publications and soon, a local installation of Dataverse, a research data repository.