ACCOLEDS 2010 Training Session

Congratulations to MLIS student Sarah Augot, who along with a UBC SLAIS student was sponsored by Statistics Canada for travel, meals and accommodations to attend the 2010 ACCOLEDS training session, hosted by the University of Regina. ACCOLEDS (A COPPUL Consortium of Library Electronic Data Services) is a committee of the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL); this yearly event serves as the Western Canadian training session for Statistics Canada's Data Liberation Initiative (DLI). The sponsorship of students to attend this event serves to introduce LIS students to the area of data librarianship, an area increasingly recognized as important for MLIS graduates.

Various topics were covered at the training session, from a snapshot of the DLI in the past year, an in-depth presentation on the General Social Survey (GSS), a presentation on marketing data services to faculty and staff and a session using free products to map data. The session on the General Social Survey was valuable in that it gave a sense of the development and implementation of a specific Statistics Canada survey. Several issues were brought up, such as the difficulties in collecting a representative sample of respondents when many people screen calls, as well as the growing number of Canadians who no longer have a land line telephone. These are important issues that will need to be addressed for the future collection of data.

Sarah would like to thank members of the ACCOLEDS Program and Local committees as well as the DLI for the great experience at this year's training session. The opportunity to network with Western Canada's data community was extremely valuable.