Research activities are a large part of the work of university librarians. However, their work often suffers from a lack of visibility, resulting in untapped potential for exchange and collaboration between librarians and researchers in information science. This project aims to help break down the silos in which the two primary target audiences- information science researchers and academic librarians- conduct their research. Canadian Publications in Library and Information Science makes visible the work that librarians do and allows other Canadian researchers to discover the research of their colleagues. We hope that this will stimulate increased collaboration amongst university librarians and researchers across Canada.

This project consists of a database and an open citation index, listing the research contributions of Canadian librarians and researchers in information sciences. This dataset and its source code is made available through this GitHub repository. It contains two CSV files; one of LIS authors, and their publications. These datasets are also available on Zenodo here. For those interesting in contributing, you may do so through the GitHub repository.

Also available is an interactive platform which allows users to view and export publications. In the future, it will also allow users to contribute to the completeness and quality of the data by proposing additions or modifications. This tool will promote and explore research in information science in Canada and help break down the walls that separate librarians and researchers by making them aware of the results of their respective research. This database will be updated annually with new publications.

This project is part of a larger SSHRC funded project of workshops and conferences and provides a means to explore a database of publications from the information science community in Canada. The website LIS Canada, available here will also provide access to these tools.

This project was carried out by two teams from Dalhousie University and the University of Montreal, in partnership with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), the Maritime Institute on Science, Technology and Society (MISTS) and the School of Library and Information Science (EBSI) of the University of Montreal. The project is directly linked to CARL's mission to improve the contribution of librarians to research and higher education, to foster the efficiency and sustainability of the creation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge, and to promote access to research results. It is also linked to the activities of the MISTS, which offers support for research on science and its relations with society, in particular by providing researchers with a technological infrastructure designed for bibliometric research.