Brown Bag Lunches at McGill Library

In May 2011, Jessica Lange and Katherine Hanz were eating lunch at the LOEX Conference in Fort Worth, Texas, when they realized that they knew very little about the research being done by other McGill librarians.  Jessica and Katherine had just spent three days attending wonderful presentations by librarians from across North America, but they started to wonder why they didn’t really know what the librarians sitting next to them at McGill were up to. Thus, the idea for the McGill Librarian Brown Bag Lunch was born.

The Brown Bag Lunch was initiated as a forum for McGill Librarians to share their research projects and areas of professional interest with one another in a relaxed and casual setting.  Two 15-20 minute presentations take place at each event, leaving plenty of time for Q & A and discussion.   Since the event began in August 2011, it has been a great eye opener to the range of work being done by our librarian colleagues.

The event has hosted talks on diverse topics, including the following presentations:

• Jill Boruff: New Learning Spaces: Collaborating with Faculty to Align Course Outcomes with Information Literacy Objectives
• Lorie Kloda: The Impact of Evidence Summaries on Library and Information Practitioners
• Andrea Miller-Nesbitt:  Accessibility for People with Disabilities in Academic Libraries
• Robin Featherstone: Evidence-Based Medicine for Haematology Residents: A Proposal for Developing and Evaluating a New Curriculum
• Robin Canuel, Megan Fitzgibbons, and Jessica Lange: Serving Diverse Learners in McGill’s School of Continuing Studies
• Ed Bilodeau: Blogging for the Liaison Librarian
• Giovanna Badia: Using Citation Analysis to Identify the Best Database to Search: A Case Study in Chemical Engineering
• Amy Buckland: How I Organized a Conference Without Losing my Mind
• April Colosimo & Giovanna Badia: Delivering Information Literacy Sessions in Adobe Connect
• Sara Holder: A Year of Living Differently: What I Did (and Learned) on Sabbatical

Keep a look out for our next event, which will be held in early 2013.  If you’d like to present at an upcoming Brown Bag Lunch, please contact Katherine Hanz (katherine.hanz@mcgill.ca) for more information.