As we’re nearing the end of final exams, it’s the perfect time to pause, reflect, and celebrate all that we’ve accomplished together this academic year at the University of Alberta Library. From busy study spaces to innovative research support, our library locations have been alive with activity—and it’s all thanks to you, our community of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and researchers.
The numbers speak for themselves, painting a picture of how deeply engaged our community has been with over 1.6 million visits to our library locations; 53,925 checkouts of library materials; 5,165 answered chat questions; and 1,502 3D-printed items.
Our subject librarians delivered 283 course-based instruction sessions that reached over 13,000 students. Such sessions covered everything from searching strategies, systematic reviews, citations, information literacy, publishing, research data management, digital scholarship, technology demonstrations and much more.
Our team also provided over 90 workshops, which empowered learners with knowledge on topics such as: evaluating information and misinformation, generative AI in research, measuring research impact for early career researchers, archival research, and digital photography for research communications. In addition to this, our subject librarians also conducted over 1,200 research consultations, offering effective and much-needed one-on-one support to U of A graduate students, faculty, undergrads, alumni, postdocs, and staff.
Our digitization and repository teams have worked tirelessly to make knowledge accessible, digitizing 4,635 items and adding 1,405 items to our ERA repository—including 675 theses and 730 other scholarly contributions. In our Aviary repository, 353 audiovisual items were uploaded, totalling 327 hours of valuable content produced by U of A students, faculty and researchers.
Our publishing team has overseen 45 new journal issues with over 1,700 articles published between September and April. Our publishing team is especially proud of our student-led journals, such as Spectrum and Eureka, which presented nationally at the Student Journal Forum and participated in Open Access Week’s Student Journal Showcase. In addition to these open journals, two new Open Educational Resources were published this year, including: The NiMe Diet: Scientific Principles and Recipes and Planet Earth: Notes on Earth Systems. Both of these resources, along with our open journals, are freely available online
We would like to thank our students, faculty, alumni and researchers who’ve spent long hours in our study spaces, partnered with us, stayed connected, and relied on our support over this past academic year. It’s been a year of learning, collaboration, and community. We’re grateful to be part of it—and we’re looking forward to what’s coming up next.
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