Beginning in my second semester of this degree, I joined the program’s student association, AESISSA. As part of AESISSA, I had the opportunity to work together with other members to plan and run events for students. During my second year, I also took over the responsibility of managing both the associations finances and the longer-term planning – running meetings, deciding what events AESISSA would run, and delegating tasks to other members. While doing so, I also took on more involved roles in certain specific events. The more successful events that I took a lead in included trips to Toronto for the Ontario Library Association (OLA) Superconference in 2024 and 2025 and a social networking evening for ÉSIS students and University of Ottawa information professionals.
Along with my involvement in AESISSA, I was also able to improve my collaboration skills through group projects in various classes. Along with the information needs analysis assignment, described in more detail on the Information Management page, my final assignment for ISI 6300: Open Access is a representative example of my group work.
OLA Trips
Both trips to OLA were exercises in problem-solving and managing communications. For the first trip, I took the lead on booking accommodations, only for a glitch in the third-party software we used to cancel our reservation. After we were able to rebook and we arrived in Toronto, I helped to facilitate the logistics of eleven people with two vehicles staying in an apartment with only one key. Based on the success of our first trip, in my second year, I took the lead in organizing another group trip for the conference. Although, in the end, I was not able to go myself, I helped to publicize the fact that we were planning the trip and coordinated communication for those who were going, by planning information and planning meetings and by communicating with the faculty about funding for the trip.
Networking Social
AESISSA intended the networking social to serve two purposes: to help forge connections between ÉSIS students and information professionals and librarians working at UOttawa and to welcome students starting the program in January. As a result, we planned it for the second week after classes restarted, which caused some difficulty in the planning process. We had hoped to invite some ÉSIS alumni to the event as well, but the timing of it prevented us from spreading invitations as effectively as we had hoped, and only one was able to attend. Despite these difficulties, however, we still managed to host a good mixture of UOttawa librarians and ÉSIS students, which allowed students to speak with professionals currently working in the field and learn what their career paths had been like. While there are changes I would make were I to run the event again, it was overall a success.
Group Work
The final assignment for ISI 6300: Open Access was to create an Open Access toolkit for researchers at UOttawa. While, at the time of writing this website, the final toolkit has not been finished, we did create a presentation of it for class. In preparing this presentation – and the final project – I was able to apply the collaboration and planning skills I have developed over the last two years. For example, I was able to effectively coordinate my three group mates and myself in completing research and the writing of initial drafts mostly independently and then combining that independent work into a coherent whole. Additionally, this project gave me valuable practice in another important aspect of collaboration: giving and receiving constructive feedback. As we began working on it, it became clear that different members of the group had different levels of understanding of the concepts we were covering, and different priorities for effective communication with our target audience. However, through clear communication, we were able to present a single, cohesive toolkit to our audience.