This week I spent some time with my partner from the McGill CLA Student Chapter Professional Partnering Program, Jared. He showed me around the Concordia libraries, where he works, and then we sat down and he told me a bit more about what he does. Since I’m interested in academic libraries, this was a great experience for me, especially since I’d never been to the Concordia libraries before.

I met him at the downtown library – his office is at the Loyola campus, but he comes downtown quite often for meetings. He showed me the collections and services available to students, but what interested me the most was meeting some of his colleagues. We had a great chat with one of his fellow librarians about information literacy programs in academic libraries, which really captured my attention because I’m taking an info lit class this semester and I hope to be involved in that area one day. We also bumped into Olivier Charbonneau, a Concordia librarian who is an expert in copyright law. I told him how much I’d enjoyed his talk at McGill last week, and Jared had a question for him about whether he could legally use an excerpt from a recent translation of an old play.

Then we took the shuttle bus to the Loyola campus, which is located in the much quieter Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood of Montreal. Here Jared introduced me to some more librarians, and I was amused to discover that they’d seen my name before: Jared had been passing around my business card because he liked the way I’d designed it at Moo.com. We sat down in his office, and he showed me his list of responsibilities for the year. It looks like Concordia is going to be keeping him busy! Besides spending a certain number of hours each week doing reference (including some chat reference), he has a number of projects working on digital services and outreach, and he’s on a whole bunch of different committees. I never doubted that academic librarians work hard, but this really confirmed it.

Overall, it was an eye-opening experience, and I’m looking forward to meeting up with Jared again.