July / August 2001 Vol. 33, no. 4

Workshop on the Services of the National Library of Canada

Monique Renaud, Acquisitions and Bibliographic Services

At the request of the Documentation Techniques Program coordinator at the CEGEP de Trois-Rivières, Monique Renaud, a resource person from the National Library of Canada (NLC), visited Trois-Rivières on May 2, 2001, to present an overview of the services offered by the NLC.

Approximately 45 people attended the workshop, most of whom were students in the Documentation Techniques Program at CEGEP de Trois-Rivières. Three professors and a few regional technicians working in the field also took part. Each participant received an information kit containing, among other things, a print copy of the Web pages listing the services of the National Library of Canada, the 2000 issue of the Read Up On It kit, bookmarks promoting NLC services and a NLC pen. Copies of the latest issue of the Bulletin and post cards illustrating our digital collections were also available for anyone who was interested.

The presentation was based primarily on the NLC’s live Web site. Within a three-hour period, a brief overview of the services available was provided. First, was a review of the "traditional" services of a national library, i.e., acquisition services (legal deposit, purchases, gifts and exchanges), preservation services (preservation and service collections, electronic publications, etc.), collections access services (including the cataloguing service, the national bibliography), bibliographic research services, interlibrary loan services as well as general and specialized reference services. Then followed descriptions of the "avant-garde" services, including, the Web site, the Digital Library of Canada and the Canadian Library Gateway. Cataloguing tools and services for publishers were also discussed. The services that raised the most number of questions were Legal Deposit, Cataloguing in Publication (CIP), Interlibrary Loans and the bilingual cataloguing policies. The products that attracted the most attention were the Digital Library of Canada and the Canadian Library Gateway site. To wrap things up, we held a draw for the most recent copy of Canadiana on CD-ROM.

An informal quiz held at the beginning of the presentation revealed that participants had a rather general knowledge of the Library. In addition, they mentioned on their evaluation form that they had received a lot of new information  -  percentages ranged from 30 to 80 percent!

Workshops of this nature contribute greatly to the promotion of the breadth and multiplicity of the services that the National Library of Canada makes available to all Canadians. These meetings foster direct dialogue with users, and provide the opportunity to answer their questions and take note of their suggestions.