2025 Saskatchewan Libraries Conference: Grow With Your Library

Presented by Rachel Sutherland & Jo Ann Murphy

The session will explore the collaborative partnership between the University of Saskatchewan Library and Foundations Learning & Skills Saskatchewan’s Spark program, showcasing how we worked together to offer meaningful volunteer opportunities for students. Participants will learn how the partnership engages students in community based service-learning through supporting literacy in the community, while encouraging critical reflection on literacy, privilege, and citizenship. The session will include information on the volunteer opportunity offered, success stories from the organizations and student perspectives, and the challenges encountered and how these were overcome.

Attendees will leave with practical insights on how to create impactful community service-learning opportunities in their own library that benefit the library as well as partners, students, and the wider community.

Presented by Ariana Giroux

Ariana Giroux will explore the concept of communal liberation as the ultimate “growth mindset” framework. Utilizing lived experiences of queer and disabled people, case studies, and the social enterprise known as Their Collective as examples, this session will highlight strategies for building diverse libraries and strong communities through inclusive and purposeful community engagement.

This session champions libraries, social enterprises, and community-led approaches as transformative tools for liberation, empowerment, and mutual education.

Yuri Forbes-Petrovich is the Branch Manager for the Yorkton Public Library. Yuri has served in a variety of academic and professional posts, including post-secondary education in Sociology and Philosophy where he taught technology studies, social theory, and environmental ethics and has published and presented research on public ethics, environmental sociology, social theory, and the philosophy of phenomenology and religion.

Presented by Ann Liang

Explore how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming libraries and empowering professionals to streamline daily tasks—but at what cost? This session delves into evaluating AI's potential in your work while highlighting its strengths and weaknesses and it will also touch on how AI has affected publishers and databases, and the pressing ethical concerns around privacy, misinformation, copyright, and licensing agreements. Delve into all the issues you need to know about when considering policies for the use of AI while balancing innovation with integrity and ensuring AI supports your library’s mission while fostering trust and accountability with stakeholders.

Sponsored by Palliser Regional Library

Presented by Wendy Thienes 

Age-Friendly is a global movement of communities where policies, services, settings and structures support and enable people to age actively in their home and/or communities of choice. An Age-Friendly Community views significant aspects, or domains, of their community through the lens of older adults’ experience and wisdom to identify ways to support better health, improved safety and greater participation of all members of the community. Session participants will hear examples of community collaboration on Age-Friendly initiatives with specific examples of public library engagement and will have the opportunity to provide ideas for ways that libraries are currently supporting Age-Friendly concepts and brainstorm additional opportunities for collaboration and support.

Presented by Taylor Soderberg, Amber Christensen, Brian Klenk, Janna Ferris & Rachael Kaseke 

Safe and welcoming is a core focus at the Regina Public Library. This has lead to the library taking an approach that is collaborative, empathy-led and involves many moving parts to facilitate a safe and welcoming environment. Engaging staff, and through engaging services of outside agencies as well as engagement with community social service groups, RPL, with a focus on Central Library has taken steps to make a change to address the diversity of needs involved in responding to a changing community. Some of these changes have included working with Family Services Regina first through a pilot and now with a contract for two full time Library Outreach and Crisis Workers at Central, a change in security teams that included a re-focus of requirements requested by the Library in our RFP process, and a key RPL staff position created to connect staff, guards and crisis workers together --- the Safe and Welcoming Specialist. The RPL presentation team will discuss the process and the steps that we took to develop, implement and the outcomes, successes and challenges of this approach. Pieces of this approach have also been taken into the way they report incidents and their suspension guidelines and reviews as well as how they work with youth. The community around public libraries continues to change and evolve with new challenges and we see this approach as a response to that changing community.