Tag Archives: conference

2009 TALM National Conference (Portland, OR… October 19-22)

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We had an amazing time in Portland, Oregon at the 2009 Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums National Conference!  This conference was life changing.  We met so many wonderful people from across the US, Canada, and even New Zealand, doing phenomenal things for their communities.  While yes it was a conference, it was so much more than that!  It really is a big community of a wide variety people, skills, knowledge, interests, and experiences coming together to share, learn, network, re-connect, and enjoy one another.   We definitely recommend it to others and we look forward to participating in the future gatherings!

While at the conference we not only networked and met with lots of great people during down time and throughout the conference events, but also attended and participated in various library, archive, and museum sessions and workshops.   Additionally we presented one of the 90-minute sessions for the conference.   Our session was about relationship building between library information schools and tribal cultural institutions and communities.   We  discussed this through the lens of our pilot TLAM course that we co-developed and implemented for the 2009 Spring semester.  We followed the presentation with an audience group discussion of how we can all collaborate, stay in touch, and help to inspire other LIS schools and communities to come together in these mutually beneficial relationships and engage in these discussions about Indigenous information issues.  We also explored ways we can revise the TLAM course for the upcoming semester as well as plan for TLAM’s sustainability into the future.

TLAMers presenting at the TALM conference in Portland. Photo taken by Kelly Webster. Left to right: Christina C., Christina J., Omar, and Cat.

During and after our presentation’s discussion with audience members (students, professors, and practitioners), it was collaboratively agreed that a Facebook Fan Page is in order for all those who are interested in tribal libraries, archives, and museums…to engage everyone in collective discussions, do networking in your region, across the country, and around the world with interested students, practitioners, professors, community members, and anyone else.   The presence of a TLAM Facebook Fan Page is in hopes not only to connect us, but also that this will help inspire and encourage/ease future collaborations, idea sharing, learning, and a place for event & conference announcements, as well as a place to post new literature links and press releases.
Everyone, please contribute and help build the fan page, as well as spread the word and invite others who you think should join!  You can find the Facebook Fan Page by searching under “Tribal Libraries, Archives, & Museums!” on Facebook.

2009 Tribal Archives, Libraries, and MuseumsTo check out the 2009 TALM conference website and find out more about the conference, go to: www.tribalconference.org

For a direct link to the 2009 TALM conference program schedule and information on sessions and events, as well as contact and other information on those who participated, presented, and/or received awards, go to:  http://www.tribalconference.org/conf09/pdf/Final_Program.pdf

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WLA 2009 Special Service Award for the Red Cliff Project

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On October 22, 2009, the Wisconsin Library Association Awards Banquet recognizes the Red Cliff Library Project by awarding a 2009 Special Service Award to the three SLIS students who conducted the project.  The project with Red Cliff helped to support and encourage the creation of TLAM at the UW-Madison School of Library and Information Studies. 

The following excerpt is from  http://www.wla.lib.wi.us/awards/awards.htm

redcliffstudents 2009WLA SSAward

Special Service Award

Chelsea Couillard, Christina Johnson and Catherine Phan share the Special Service Award for their Community Needs Assessment for the Red Cliff Tribal Library, conducted when all three were students at the UW-Madison School of Library and Information Studies. In the summer of 2007, the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in Bayfield County began to discuss closing the tribal library. The library was out of compliance with statutory requirements for system membership, usage was declining and little money was available from the tribal budget for the library.

The students were awarded a Kaufmann Entrepreneurship Community Internship grant for the summer and fall 2008-09 in order to conduct the needs assessment, under faculty supervision and staff cooperation, and in partnership with the Red Cliff Tribe. The students made monthly visits to the Red Cliff Reservation between June and November 2008, for community discussion and self-education. They collaborated with Joe Bresette, Red Cliff Tribal Operations Director; Jim Trojanowski, Northern Waters Library Service Director; Tim Kane, UW Extension Educator; and Janice Rice, UW-Madison librarian and then president of the American Indian Library Association.

Trojanowski, who nominated the group for the WLA Special Service award, reports that the Red Cliff Tribe is working hard to reopen the library. He states that though meeting statutory requirements for system membership is likely to remain a challenge for the library, “the fact that any library service will be available is a remarkable achievement that is unlikely to have occurred without the work of Christina, Catherine and Chelsea.”

The final report, Mazina’igan Wakai’igan: Red Cliff Tribal Library was released in December 2008. Currently, Coulliard is employed in Children’s Services at Baraboo Public Library; Johnson is the librarian in the American Indian Studies Library at UW-Madison; Phan is at MERIT, the School of Education Library at UW-Madison.

From left to right: Christina Johnson, Catherine Phan, and Chelsea Couillard–and the UW motor pool vehicle they drove one of many trips to Red Cliff.  Photo courtesy of UW-Madison SLIS.

 

 

Conference on Global Climate Change and Indigenous Communities

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On Friday March 6th, the law school held a conference addressing Global Climate Change. I attended a panel discussion on the effect of climate change on indigenous communities. Although this is off topic from libraries, archives and museums, I thought there may be some correlation in so far as education and information exchange is concerned.
The speaker addressed climate change in the Arctic and talked specifically of the Inuit peoples in northern Canada. These people depend on the ice for their livelihood. They are primarily hunters and are endangered by the melting ice, as this limits access to hunting territory and poses risks (i.e. falling through ice).
As of right now, traditional hunting practices are still being preserved, but more and more food is having to be shipped because of melting ice, reduction of hunting area etc…
Although it too soon to measure the affects this will have on the population researchers as well as the local population fear that this dramatic change of diet and lifestyle could have dire consequences to the overall health of the community.
Our speaker, Rica, from Ebling Library, on Thursday addressed issues of Native American Health in correlation with libraries and specifically what resources librarians can provide to tribes/communities. During the talk I pondered the consequences of climate change on this particular community and how information services could possibly be useful.
It seems that with more information the Inuit community could better prepare for the inevitable warming and melting of the ice. Unfortunately, it does not seem likely that life will be able to stay the same for this particular population, simply because the trends of warming are so drastic, seemingly irreversible at this point. But can the community survive and adapt to the rapid changes? The work being done now suggests that people are beginning to prepare for major changes of livelihood and lifestyle- but this is where libraries, archives and museums could be very useful for the community.
Libraries obviously can provide information and help people make more informed choices about anything from economics to healthy diets, but archives and museums are the places where the culture, stories, and artifacts can be preserved.
It is sad and unfortunate that museums and archives may one day soon be the only place that one can recall the original history of the Inuit, but it is better than having that information lost forever. It seems that until we as a global community start making efforts to slow down global climate change, libraries, museums and archives are going to be invaluable deposits for many peoples history.