Interview with Jordan Hale, Digital Repositories Librarian: written by Monique Mery

Hello everyone! My name is Monique Mery, I’m a third year Biomedical Science student and this is my first term as a Library Ambassador and I’m super excited to be a part of this amazing team! I’m always at the Library studying or using its resources, so becoming a Library Ambassador was a great way to spread the Library’s awesomeness to everyone. I love getting involved and meeting new people, so this program was a perfect fit for me.

This term we got tasked with interviewing library staff about their jobs. I met up with Jordan Hale to learn about the awesome work they do in the Library. Jordan is the Digital Repositories Librarian here at UWaterloo. With a double degree in Geography and previously working at the University of Toronto at the Map & Data Library, Jordan joined the UWaterloo library team in July of 2018. Jordan is in charge of the digital repositories which means they spend most of their time working on UWSpace, which is an open access research repository for academic publications; including theses and dissertations published here at the University. They focus on communicating with faculty and helping them understand their options in order to fulfil their responsibilities to federal funding agencies and support them in their scholarly publishing endeavours. In English, Jordan’s work is focused around providing open and no-cost access to resources.

One of the scariest moments in your university experience is not writing a 70% final, it’s going to the checkout counter at the Bookstore and seeing the bill for your textbooks. Jordan is part of the big movement to help eliminate the large costs associated with textbooks. They are helping to create and share resources at low, preferably no costs. Students really benefit from Jordan’s work. Jordan is also involved in bringing people into the publishing process, supporting them through it (helping them understand the process of publishing) and help make their resources available.

Jordan loves working here at UWaterloo because everyone here takes their work seriously but not themselves, they never could have imagined a collegial friendly workplace where everyone works hard but has fun while doing it. UW Library is the friendliest place they’ve ever worked at. Oh, and they love Goose week here at UWaterloo Library.

It was a great pleasure to meet Jordan and sit down and talk with them and learn about their contributions and work here at the University of Waterloo Library.

-Monique