While health libraries are known as places of learning for faculty and students in science and medicine, they can also be spaces for bonding and skill sharing for all community members who use the library. UBC’s Woodward Library embodied this mentality in November 2024 and February 2025, when we hosted our Repair Cafes. Hosted by UBC Library’s Library Climate Action Team as programs associated with British Columbia Library Association’s Climate Action Week and UBC’s Climate Emergency Week events, the repair cafes were spaces in which students, staff, faculty, and community members were welcomed to bring broken electronics and clothing items and learn to repair them. The intention behind this initiative was not only to provide a repair service, but to encourage participants to learn to do their own repairs, empowering them to make more sustainable choices in the future. Drawing on local talent, volunteers were on hand to assist participants with hand and machine sewing, darning, and repair of small electronics. While attendees waited for their turn at the repair table, they were able to make reusable beeswax food wraps, attempt a climate-themed Lego challenge, check out a mending book display, or have a free treat.

This lighting talk will discuss the benefits we saw from this event and the challenges we encountered. It will conclude with a brief discussion of how community engagement events related to collaborative learning and climate change fit in with the ethos of health and science academic libraries.

Background: UBC is the only academic institution in British Columbia that provides accredited master's degrees for rehabilitation professionals in Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and Audiology and Speech Sciences. British Columbia is struggling with a shortage of rehabilitation professionals, leading to the expansion of UBC’s rehabilitation programs to satellite sites in Surrey, Prince George, and Victoria (Health Sciences Association of British Columbia, 2021).

Case Presentation: UBC Library has adopted a distributed model of librarianship to match this distributed education model. The model was developed by librarians who support UBC’s distributed Undergraduate Medicine program, but it has only been adopted by rehabilitation sciences within the last five years. In practice, our model consists of one coordinating librarian who supports the Vancouver cohort of each program and oversees the coordination of teaching, collections, and resource development for the entire program. Each distributed site has its own on-site librarian who supports their cohort as one part of their multi-faceted roles.

Conclusions: This presentation will describe our model of library support for UBC’s continually developing rehabilitation programs. We will outline the benefits of the model, including improving the learning experience for students through onsite teaching, reducing the burden of keeping up with program expansions, and bringing multiple perspectives into our work. We will also discuss challenges that we have faced, such as coordination with instructors at multiple sites and technical issues with hybrid teaching. Though this model is not without its challenges, it is nevertheless a novel way to ensure that all students in these distributed programs have equitable access to library support.

Reference:

Health Sciences Association of British Columbia. (2021, October). ‘We’re chronically understaffed’: A report on public rehabilitative healthcare in BC. https://hsabc.org/sites/default/files/2022-10/hsa-chronically-understaffed-exec-summary-for-web.pdf