Mark your calendars! The Alberta Association of Academic Libraries (AAAL) Spring Meeting will be held virtually on Thursday, May 12, 2022. Meeting link meeting link and further information will be forthcoming.

The theme for AAAL’s Spring meeting is Care Work: Practices and Ethics of Care in Academic Libraries. Caretaking or care work is a fundamental, but historically unacknowledged, part of academic library work, whether in preserving physical and digital collections, providing service to library users, or managing staff. While the COVID-19 pandemic and related shifts have brought the care-based dimensions of libraries to the fore, libraries are also increasingly asked to take on the kinds of work typically performed by explicitly care-based professions. More broadly, there has been an ongoing shift of the burden of care from the social to the individual, ranging from the rhetoric of self-care to how the collective risks of a global pandemic are mitigated.

We invite proposals that consider what a care-based perspective might offer for academic libraries. What new challenges or pitfalls might a view of library work as care introduce? What examples of practices of care can you share with the AAAL community?