Collegial Self-Governance for Professional Librarians: A Look at the Advantages of the Establishment of a Library Council and its Role in the Lives of the Librarians in the Brock University Faculty Association

The ability to perform collegial governance is a cornerstone of modern universities in the United States and Canada. This idea of governance is well practiced among faculty members but is not often practiced to the same extent with librarians in those same institutions. In this chapter, I will look at a popular form of collegial governance called the Library Council. Further, I will examine how the Library Council at Brock University has enabled librarians there to perform meaningful collegial self-governance.

Toward Self-Organising Service Communities

This paper discusses a framework in which catalog service communities are built, linked for interaction, and constantly monitored and adapted over time. A catalog service community (represented as a peer node in a peer-to-peer network) in our system can be viewed as domain specific data integration mediators representing the domain knowledge and the registry information. The query routing among communities is performed to identify a set of data sources that are relevant to answering a given query. The system monitors the interactions between the communities to discover patterns that may lead to restructuring of the network (e.g., irrelevant peers removed, new relationships created, etc.).