Data & Information Professional

Erin Bourgard

Who I am

My name is Erin Bourgard, and I have lived in London, Ontario since 2002.

My paternal family immigrated to Canada from Ireland in 1852 during the Irish famine and settled in Artemesia Township, Ontario. I grew up in this beautiful valley landscape across from Eugenia Falls. My family has lived in this area for over 165 years. Artemesia Township is situated in the traditional territory of the Anishinabek, the Odawa, and the Huron-Wendat people. This territory was ceded in 1818 through Treaty 18, known as the Lake Simcoe-Nottawasaga Treaty

My Professional Credentials

Certifications & Training

Fundamentals of OCAP First Nations Information Governance
Wikidata Summer Institute
Certificate in Library Carpentry
Certificate in Project Management
ACRL DSS: Python for Librarians and Digital Humanists
Library Management Institute: The Manager

education background

Master in Library and Information Science
B.A. in Media, Information and Technoculture
Diploma Applied Photography

Skills Highlight

Controlled vocabulary and classification schema (LCSH, CSH, MeSH, LCNAF, LCC, NLM, KF Modified)
Library Metadata (RDA, Marc21, XML, Dublin Core)
Data cleaning and analysis (MarcEdit, Excel, Regular Expressions, OpenRefine, SPSS, Python basics)
Ex Libris’ Alma (Analytics, Metadata Editor, Normalization Rules, Electronic Collections)

My Journey

Librarianship is my second career. I just fell into it, bonding with libraries later in life while pursuing a B.A. in Media, Information, and Technoculture. When I decided to take this program I was looking to expand my 8 year career as a freelance photographer, but as it turns out that was not my path. One of the core courses of this program was Information and Its Context, and it was during this course that I decided I wanted to be a librarian. I obtained a Master in Library and Information Science in 2012 and a certificate in Project Management in 2015.

Examples of my work