Angela Pollak

Current Projects...

 

If you are interested in collaborating or are willing to assist with these or other projects, please contact me!

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Resilient Information Behaviour

with Julie Hersberger and Shelbi Webb. The historical origins and theoretical conceptualizations of resilience are examined to establish the process and variables at play when individuals attempt to regain equilibrium following a crisis event. This review of the literature suggests that individuals who engage in a range of coping skills are perceived as better able to acquire needed resources to aid in recovery efforts post-trauma in order to achieve equilibrium or even improve on their previous status to achieve a level above that (thriving or flourishing).

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A Leaf from Algonquin Park: The Ultimate Bibliography of an Epic Place

This project collocates and enumerates extant bibliographic records relating to Algonquin Provincial Park. These records currently exist across a disparate spectrum of libraries, archives, media and other sources provincially, nationally and internationally. Representing a variety of publication formats from journal articles, to news and images, to fiction and filmography, to memorabilia and sound recordings and sourced from academic databases, provincial, national, and international catalogs and archives, references are arranged alphabetically then indexed thematically. I present the references via carefully designed indexes to engage in bibliographic storytelling about the many facets of Algonquin Park and to make the content more easily accessible to different audiences and interpretable from different perspectives. These stories are currently inaccessible to all audiences due to the absence of comprehensive, authoritative tertiary information about this century old Canadian national park, much loved at home and renowned abroad.

 

Idea Tourism

Idea tourism commodifies experiential skills hidden in rural communities, and markets them to ‘information tourists’ seeking lifelong learning opportunities. It is tourism based on learning a skill through experiencing it in its natural environment. I am proposing to embark on a 3 year mixed methods research project to comprehensively identify and study place-based tourism products nationally and internationally. I would like to model the options, benefits, and costs of each potential alternative organizational structure, establish a test site to document the processes and challenges of doing so, and finally, create a support system that can help extend the solution to other struggling communities.  The support system would include tools to assess candidate communities, best practices and instructions for how to implement this type of solution elsewhere, ongoing support for finding funding and developing curriculum/product offerings, marketing the product, and training people within the community to provide services and support.