On Friday 17 November 2017, a visiting group from the University of British Columbia (UBC) Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada were welcomed at the Pridi Banomyong Library. They included Jo-Anne M. Naslund, an Instructional Programs Librarian at the UBC Education Library, whose subject specialties are children’s literature of Canada and the world, and education. Ajarn Jo-Anne has authored and co-authored many scholarly studies about education, such as Towards School Library 2.0: An introduction to social software tools for teacher librarians; Letting students take the lead: A user-centred approach to evaluating subject guides; Evidence Based Library and Information Practice; Dimensions of Responsive Multicultural Library Services at the University of British Columbia (UBC): Successes and Challenges; Investigating Cases: Problem-Based Learning and the Library; and Problem-Based Learning in Teacher Education.

Last year, in recognition of her outstanding service to the Teacher Education Program, Jo-Anne Naslund was presented with the Murray Elliott Service Award at the Vancouver Children’s Literature Roundtable (VCLR), supporting the children’s literature community of Vancouver. Among her achievements was

supporting every teacher candidate in developing an understanding of the resources available to help them in their journey toward becoming an exemplary educator. Jo-Anne’s practice is based on the needs of teacher candidates in the 21st century: she both embraces technology and finds ways to provide teacher candidates with the support they need to integrate technology into their practice. An exemplary librarian and teacher-librarian, Jo-Anne provides leadership by working closely with instructors and their students to keep abreast of new curricular and pedagogical developments. She mobilizes community resources, acts as an ambassador at various off-campus events, and is unfailingly helpful to all who seek her assistance. She is also to be commended for her commitment to showcasing literary events, Canadian authors and multiple resources to support learning.

As a progressive educator, Ajarn Jo-Anne told the UBC student newspaper:

The unfair treatment of people comes about because of ignorance, or lack of understanding… And for educators, they are working with all students, and so they really need to have that knowledge and that background and that real understanding so that they are not seeing students in a very stereotyped way…We always have ‘double education’ when we are here in the education faculty, because one hopes that through their experiences, [graduates] will then be able to take that further.

Also part of the group visiting the Pridi Banomyong Library on November 17 was Ajarn Jim Placzek, an instructor at the Pridi Banomyong International College (PBIC), Tha Prachan Campus. Before beginning to teach at PBIC, Ajarn Jim spent many years at the UBC Center for Southeast Asian Research, Adjunct as a specialist in Southeast Asian Cultural History, Theravada Buddhism, and Thai language. Ajarn Jim has written and co-written such interesting articles as The Historical Construction of Southeast Asian Studies: Korea and Beyond; Sitavana: The Theravada Forest Tradition in British Columbia, among others.

University of British Columbia Library

The UBC Library is one of the largest research libraries in Canada, with 15 branches and divisions, including on- and off-campus locations. Its collections include over 10 million items. UBC Library has the largest collection of Asian-language materials in North America and the largest biomedical collection in Western Canada.

In 2015-2016, the UBC Library had more than 3.8 million visits to its branches and over 9.7 million visits to its website. Among other tasks, it processed over 1.2 million loans to UBC student, faculty, staff and community borrowers and provided more than 15 million e-book and e-journal downloads.

The UBC Library Collections include over 7.9 million volumes in print and electronic form, access to more than 2.3 million e-books and 290,000 journal titles, as well as 205,000 digital objects in locally produced digital collections. It has digitized more than 30,000 UBC theses as part of the Retrospective Theses and Dissertation project. The most recent UBC Library Strategic Plan (2015 – 2017) was motivated by the following mission:

UBC Library advances research, learning and teaching excellence by connecting communities, within and beyond the University, to the world’s knowledge.

VISION

We are a globally influential research library, promoting knowledge creation, exploration and discovery.

VALUES

service excellence

collaboration with campus and community partners

stewardship of collections and institutional resources

innovation, creativity and risk-taking

an open, inclusive and respectful workplace

leadership and individual growth throughout the organization

intellectual freedom and pursuit of knowledge

Among its outstanding collections is The Asian Library, located in the Asian Centre. It has over 580,000 volumes in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Urdu and Indonesian languages. The UBC Library’s Norman Colbeck Collection of materials written by English and Anglo-Irish poets and essayists of the Romantic, Victorian and Edwardian periods is also noteworthy, as are the archives of the Canadian author Douglas Coupland, whose novel Shampoo Planet is available for loan on the Fiction Stacks of the Pridi Banomyong Library. The UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections division also contains a Harry Potter Collection with rare editions of the series of fantasy novels written by British author J. K. Rowling, also well represented in the TU Libraries Collection in circulating copies.

The UBC Library also owns the Uno Langmann Family Collection of B.C. Photographs with more than 18,000 rare and unique early photographs of British Columbia and the H. Colin Slim Stravinsky Collection, documenting the work and life of the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. Of special interest is the UBC’s Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection,

of over 25,000 rare and one-of-a-kind items relating to the discovery of BC, the development of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and Chinese immigration to Canada. The collection includes documents, books, maps, posters, paintings, photographs, silver, glass, ceramic ware and other artifacts.

Dr. Wallace B. Chung gathered an extensive research collection, particularly focused on the experience of Chinese people in North America. Dr. Chung attended UBC, among other Canadian universities. As a medical student he specialized in vascular surgery and served as professor of surgery and head of the department of surgery at the UBC Hospital for many years. His wife Dr. Madeline Chung, born in Shanghai, specialized in obstetrics and gynecology and was for a time the only Chinese-speaking obstetrician in Vancouver, where she delivered over 6,500 babies.

Among the UBC Library’s other initiatives is its Great Reads Collection, offering hundreds of leisure reading choices to students and ajarns. These include literary classics, fiction, and non-fiction bestsellers, reminding everyone that reading is sanook. The library also purchased a collection of films from Videomatica, a video rental store in Vancouver, amounting to 28,000 DVDs, 4,000 VHS titles and 900 Blu-Rays of films from more than 75 countries. All items in the Videomatica Collection may be borrowed on 3-day loan, unless they have been placed on reserve for a UBC course.

Two years ago, UBC Library opened a Library Preservation and Archives (PARC), a modular storage facility providing 2,280 square meters of high-density collection storage for about 1.6 million volumes, as well as the campus-wide records management service.

The University Librarian at UBC is Susan E. Parker who assumed her responsibilities three months ago. According to a UBC press release, Susan Parker’s

research interests include leadership in academic libraries and higher education, organization theory, and the concept of “credible optimism” emphasizing the importance of positivity in the pursuit of realistic and sustainable goals.

Among the ventures she is leading is to make the UBC Library more green and environmentally sustainable through a partnership with Better World Books (BWB), a social venture that collects used books and textbooks from nearly 3,100 libraries across the U.S. and Canada for reuse or recycling. In another initiative, an annual Food for Fines campaign, money is raised to support UBC students in need. The campaign waives $2 in UBC Library fines for every food item donated, to a maximum of $30. Non-perishable food items are collected at circulation desks and distributed to a local food bank.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and the TU Libraries)