Category: News

Presented during the Annual Conference, the APLA Merit Award honours an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to library services in the Atlantic Provinces.

Some of the contributions that might be considered in selecting a person for this award are; leadership in library associations at the local, regional and provincial levels; contributions to the development, application and utilization of library services and library systems; significant contribution to library literature.

If you know someone who you would like to nominate for the APLA Merit Award, please submit Nominations, including documentation of the nominee’s achievements and letters of support, by April 24th, to APLA’s Past President, past-president@apla.ca.

In memory of Shelagh Mikulak who was a leader in the library community, an innovator in her field, and an inspiration to those she worked with. Shelagh valued and respected the individuals she worked with throughout her career, mentoring aspiring and established librarians alike. As a long-standing and executive member of the Calgary Law Library Group, past president of the Special Libraries Association of Western Canada, and volunteer with the Canadian Library Association and Canadian Association of Law Libraries, Shelagh dedicated her time to encouraging the professional development of others in her field.

Click here to learn more about Shelagh Neary Mikulak.

Two awards at approximately $2,500 each, applied directly to tuition. Preferably one award for an undergraduate student and one for a graduate student.

Applicant must:

  • be enrolled in a Library and Information Sciences or Library Technician program, (certificate, diploma, or graduate degree) who demonstrates a passion for the library sciences field.
  • be in any year of study at a Canadian post-secondary institution.
  • demonstrate financial need.
  • demonstrate good academic standing (cumulative GPA greater than or equal to 2.7 or 70%).
  • provide one letter of reference.

Apply now

Deadline: June 1, 2026

Literacy Nova Scotia, Dalhousie University’s Department of Information Science, and Yorkville University are inviting individuals with direct experience in literacy-related work to participate in a survey on literacy in Nova Scotia:

https://surveys.dal.ca/opinio/s?s=83388

Help in sharing this survey with colleagues, partners, or networks who may be eligible to participate will be greatly appreciated. Hearing from a wide range of literacy-related professionals and volunteers across Nova Scotia is essential to ensuring diverse perspectives are represented.

About Literacy Nova Scotia

Literacy Nova Scotia is a non-profit organization that advances literacy for Nova Scotians by supporting access to quality literacy, essential skills, and lifelong learning opportunities. As part of this work, Literacy Nova Scotia is developing methods to assess literacy in ways that are flexible, equitable, geographically relevant, and culturally considerate.

About the survey and eligibility to participate

This survey aims to gather diverse perspectives on literacy across Nova Scotia. You are eligible to participate if you self-identify as having direct experience/involvement (within the last five years or present) in paid or unpaid literacy-related work in Nova Scotia. This may include roles such as:

  • educators (adult, elementary, high school, early years/preschool/daycare)
  • literacy practitioners
  • volunteers in literacy-related organizations
  • government employees or policymakers
  • funding agency staff
  • researchers
  • library staff
  • literacy-related organization staff
  • non-profit or community organization staff involved in literacy programming
  • other literacy-related roles

The online survey consists of 25 questions and will take approximately 15-20 minutes to complete. Participation is anonymous, and your name is not required.

Your perspective is important. Your insights will help inform the development of more inclusive and effective approaches to understanding and supporting literacy across Nova Scotia.

The survey will close on Friday, May 1st, 2026, so we encourage you to respond at your earliest convenience.

Find the survey link here: https://surveys.dal.ca/opinio/s?s=83388

If you have any questions about the survey, please contact LFNS@dal.ca

 

The Visible Minority Librarians of Canada (ViMLoC) Mentorship Program is now accepting applications for the 2026 session! This mentoring session will run from May 1st to June 30th, 2026. To apply as a mentor or mentee, please fill out the mentor application form or mentee application form.

*** Applications will close on April 17, 2026 ***

About this program

The Visible Minority Librarians of Canada (ViMLoC) recognizes the need to help visible minority librarians, especially early career and new immigrant librarians, develop their professional careers, as well as the need to encourage and guide visible minority library students with career planning. Lack of mentorship is often cited as a challenge among visible minority librarians, and through our mentorship program, we found that small acts of mentorship were able to make an impact on our mentees. Applying for this program will help create a larger network of visible minority librarians and increase our representation in the library profession. The 2026 ViMLoC mentoring program will recruit experienced visible minority librarians as potential mentors, as well as facilitate the matching of potential mentors to mentees. ViMLoC membership is NOT required to participate in this program, however, you are encouraged to sign up for ViMLoC membership. Please visit our mentorship program page for more information.

Should I apply?

This program is open to visible minority librarians at all stages of their career, and visible minority library students. In Canada, the visible minority population consists mainly of the following groups: Chinese, South Asian, Black, Arab, West Asian, Filipino, Southeast Asian, Latin American, Japanese and Korean. Participants with the intersectionality of these backgrounds are welcome to apply. We need mentors with all kinds of experience and skills. In recognition of your contribution to the mentorship program, we would be happy to provide mentors with a reference letter.

Expectations

Applicants to the program are expected

  • to commit to the full term of the session;
  • to keep in touch with their mentorship partner a minimum of twice per month or with their mentoring group a minimum of once a month (by email, phone, Zoom, or other means of communication upon mutual agreement);

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at vimloc@gmail.com

School librarian Kristen Welbourn says it is horrible to feel uncertainty over who pays for her job and how much longer she might have it.

Welbourn was among a crowd of about 40 people who rallied outside Halifax city hall on Tuesday evening to urge the municipality to keep funding in place for school librarians.

The Halifax Regional Centre for Education (HRCE) pays for about 75 library support specialists through the Halifax municipality’s supplementary education fund, which is unique in the province.

The HRCE and Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) are currently negotiating a new memorandum of understanding guiding how the supplementary funding is spent, and no final decisions have been made public yet.

Continue reading “Nova Scotia: Halifax school librarians feeling ‘demeaned’ in funding fight between city, province” →

The Atlantic Provinces Library Association’s Information Literacy Interest Group invites you to attend the Virtual Info Lit Drop-in Learning Space. This is an opportunity for those interested in information literacy instruction and practices to meet others with varied instruction experience to connect and share pedagogies, activities, and techniques. We are aiming to host three virtual drop-in spaces throughout the year.

Our next drop-in will be held on Wednesday, April 8, 2026 at 12:30 – 1:30 pm (Atlantic time), and hosted by Dr. Ben Mitchell, Williams Lake Campus Librarian at TRU. Feel free to bring your lunch!

The theme for this session is: Information literacy and ludic (gaming) literacies

Much like education generally, at its best, game design attempts to answer the important question: How can we design interactive systems that people actively want to participate in, simply because they find participating to be engaging, rewarding, meaningful. and, importantly, fun? At its worst, it is the question of how to design interlocking systems of manipulation, exploitation, and psychological coercion (Roblox, loot boxes, microtransactions, etc.). Seeking to go beyond the “chocolate covered broccoli” approach to gamification that is so common in discussions of gaming and literacy, this discussion will explore how to use the games that people already love (and hate) to help them understand key literacy principles.

Possible topics for discussion may include:

  • What are some of the games you have loved/hated, and why?
  • Do you consider yourself to be gaming literate, why or why not?
  • Has a game taught you anything?
  • What are some paratexts that have shaped your thinking about games?
  • How have the games you’ve played shaped your understanding of literacy and approach to instruction
  • What do you think the relationship is between literacy and design principles?
  • Is a game-based approach to education possible in contexts where students are not meaningfully free to not participate?

You can share as much or as little as you feel comfortable sharing, and if you just want to listen to other participants, that is fine, too. We will maintain a supportive atmosphere with a focus on encouraging and empowering fellow information professionals in their teaching journeys.

You do not have to be currently employed as an information professional to participate in this session. Students are welcome to participate!

Please register to join: https://forms.gle/wrYHgkBbLRJ79RoK9

A Zoom link will be sent to you closer to the event.

Drop-in overview:

Welcome (introductions and land acknowledgments)
Theme discussion
Evaluation of session
Closing

The following email has been sent to government officials:

Parks Canada announced in late 2025 that The Canadian Register of Historic Places (aka historicplaces.ca website) will be decommissioned in Spring 2026.

Reaching the end of its technological life, there is no plan for replacement of this vital tool and system of record for ca. 13,500 historic designations in Canada. Heritage advocates are scrambling to save the data and find a replacement.

Administered by Parks Canada, The Register was launched in 2004 as an online, searchable, publicly accessible database under the Historic Places Initiative, a collaboration between the federal, provincial and territorial governments to improve protection of the country’s historic sites and to foster a culture of heritage conservation in Canada.

APLA is writing to advocate that the Register’s information contents are retained and remain accessible in both the immediate and short-term. We are also asking that a collaborative longer-term solution is found.

With the loss of such an important national database, there is an urgent need to preserve the information with respect to Prince Edward Island that is currently maintained in the Register’s database. Does the Provincial Government have a plan to save the data before it is disabled this spring?

We look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

Terri Winchcombe
President, Atlantic Provinces Library Association
On behalf of APLA members

The following letter was sent to members of government:

I am writing to you today on behalf of the Atlantic Provinces Library Association to express my concerns about the elimination of the Documentary Heritage Communities Program (DCHP) by Library and Archives Canada, due to recent budget cuts by the federal government.

The DHCP supports the preservation of and access to Canada’s documentary heritage for Canadians, particularly material that is often overlooked by bigger institutions. Since 2015, it has provided funding to support more than 400 projects that have allowed small, community-based organizations to preserve and provide access to archives of marginalized, minority, and underrepresented groups, including indigenous communities.

Archives and libraries play a vital role in enabling the public to understand, access, and make sense of our collective histories, which serve as the foundations of our country, our society, and identities. Millions of historical documents, photographs, maps, and audio-visual items are held in archives and libraries across the country and made accessible to the public.

Archives and libraries are fundamental to the success of countless public, private, and educational enterprises. They also support Canada’s knowledge-based economy by sustaining and facilitating access to our knowledge resources. For archival and library repositories to continue to fulfil their missions to preserve and make available documentation about these shared histories, they must be recognized, protected and funded accordingly.

The entire archival and library community are extremely concerned about the negative impact that eliminating the DHCP will have on the preservation of and access to our collective histories.

Cutting this program will devastate small, underfunded archives that rely on this program to carry out their work.

I respectfully ask that you advocate for the restoration of dedicated federal support for community-based documentary heritage work, whether through reinstating DCHP or creating a comparable program. Protecting and providing access to Canada’s documentary heritage is an investment in education, accountability, identity, and intergenerational knowledge.

Thank you for your time and for representing our community. I would appreciate knowing your position on this issue and any steps you are taking to address it.

Yours sincerely,

Terri Winchcombe
President, Atlantic Provinces Library Association
On behalf of APLA members

Although there’s uncertainty around her future as a school librarian, Kristin Welbourn is certain of one fact: she loves her job.

“It’s one of the most rewarding jobs,” she told The Chronicle Herald. “There’s so much more to it than just books. I help our community raise great kids.”

But a recent decision by Halifax regional council could see funding for Welbourn’s job in jeopardy, with dozens of other librarians across the Halifax Regional Centre for Education (HRCE) sharing concerns about their livelihood.

Halifax Regional Municipality was asked to comment on the potential cuts to HRCE’s funding, which were originally shared by Education Minister Brendan Maguire on social media, but wouldn’t confirm them.

Continue reading “Nova Scotia: Halifax school librarians facing budget uncertainty, fear jobs are in jeopardy” →