Ania Dymarz, Monica Rettig, Meghan Ecclestone, & Bruce Harpham present their poster entitled “Defining the Movement: Student Initiatives at the Faculty of Information” at the TRY conference, May 5th, 2009.
A week after the TRY conference at the University of Toronto, many of the themes brought up by the various conference sessions are still resonating for me. Dean Seamus Ross opened the conference with a plenary session that addressed a range of issues from digital preservation to interoperability to advocacy and outreach. Of the sessions I attended I was particularly impressed by the work of a handful of librarians at the University of Toronto who are developing customizable and interactive tutorials cleverly titled “RE:search” library tutorials. While the session I participated in focused on redeploying information literacy content in a number of different formats, the purpose of the RE:search library tutorials was to redeploy the format while accommodating for diverse content. Designing information literacy programs with this kind of flexibility in mind is, I think, central to successful library initatives. The conference wrapped up with an engaging roundtable event that brought together the Chief Librarians from Ryerson, University of Toronto, and York University. Now into its sixth year, the TRY conference continues to be a highly relevant forum through which librarians can learn from each other’s projects and insights.