Hello there -

I’m a Collection Strategies Librarian at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

I also hold an appointment as Adjunct Senior Industry Fellow with the Social Equity Research Centre at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

I share updates with this page.

To reach out: sarah.polkinghorne@ualberta.ca

I'm a librarian and information science researcher with a longstanding interest in people’s everyday interactions with information and technology. I explore the impacts of information systems for society and on people’s lives, including the embodied (often tacit) experience of needing, finding, using, creating, and sharing information.

Recent Publications

Presentations

Upcoming & recent

  • “Transformative” agreements between publishers and libraries. Guest lecture for LIS 591: Publishing, School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alberta (February 2024)

  • What does it mean to engage in transdisciplinary research? Preparing for future collaborations. Workshop with Lisa Given for the QUT Digital Media Research Centre / ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society Summer School, Queensland University of Technology (February 2024)

  • Pathways to positive change: Exploring research engagement in practice contexts. A panel I chaired, with Lynne Bowker, Brian Detlor, Mary Greenshields, and Dana Mckay for the 86th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (October 2023)

  • Building a bigger table: Food research, methods, policy, and action in library and information science. A panel chaired by Xiaotong Du, with Melissa Ocepek and Kaitlin Costello, for the 86th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (October 2023)

Teaching

Recent experiences

  • Information Resource Discovery for the University of Ottawa’s School of Information Studies. An introduction to information services, information interaction and practices, and advanced search concepts and techniques (for Fall 2020 — I adapted and built the course for online)

Practice

I’ve just returned to my practice role after two years in a research fellowship

The core of my current librarian work is collection strategies. This includes publisher/vendor negotiations, assessment, and leading initiatives such as enriching supports for text accessibility in our digital collections. I am also involved in scholarly communications, particularly around emerging approaches to open scholarship, such as the implementation of transformative (“read and publish”) agreements.

Service

Recent commitments

  • 2024 Award Jury Chair, Best JASIST Paper, Association for Information Science & Technology