FIMS News
Contact Information
FIMS Communications
Becky Blue
Email
519-661-2111x88493
FIMS & Nursing Building
Rm 2060C
Harleen Grewal: Finding Her Voice in the Details
Winter 2026
By Yu Chen
Harleen's hometown: Toronto, Ontario
From growing up in Toronto to completing a hands-on co-op placement in Regina, MLIS student Harleen Grewal reflects on identity, inclusive metadata, and discovering her place in the profession.
---
Harleen Grewal grew up in Toronto, Ont., moving between several communities across the Greater Toronto Area. Frequently being the “new kid” meant learning how to adapt to unfamiliar environments, but it also meant growing up in spaces shaped by linguistic, cultural, and social diversity.
Those early experiences shaped an awareness of how people move through institutions differently, according to their own experiences and expectations. “This awareness continues to inform how I approach access, description, and inclusion in libraries,” she says.
Her path to library and information science was not a direct one. Harleen began her undergraduate studies in biomedical sciences with the intention of pursuing medicine. That changed after she took an English elective, where she discovered her interest in literature and critical inquiry. She followed that interest, completing a BA in English and then a MA in Literatures of Modernity at Toronto Metropolitan University.
During this period of study, she began to see information work differently. “I began to see information work not as neutral or purely technical, but as deeply connected to questions of representation and voice,” she says.
Fun Fact
As a life-long Belieber, Harleen was convinced her favourite was purple.
Harleen chose Western’s MLIS program for its professional orientation, flexible pathways, and strong sense of community. From her first visit, she felt supported by faculty and students, and saw it as a space where theory and practice could meaningfully inform one another.
Those connections became especially tangible during her co-op placement at the University of Regina’s Dr. John Archer Library and Archives. Working with affiliated colleges, like the First Nations University of Canada and Luther College, Harleen contributed to cataloguing and metadata projects with an emphasis on inclusive and reparative description.
“Inclusive description means thinking carefully about whose voices are represented and how communities choose to be described,” she says.
In addition to cataloguing work, Harleen assisted with digitization projects, collaborated with faculty, and conducted literature reviews focused on queer and inclusive metadata vocabularies. She designed instruction material and reference guides, while working one-on-one with undergraduate students. She also led a multilingual initiative creating videos on APA style in English, Hindi, and Panjabi to support students whose primary language is not English. The co-op placement marked her first time relocating out of province, an experience that required adaptability both professionally and personally.
The co-op also gave her a clearer sense of how her academic training translates into meaningful professional work.
“Applying coursework in information organization, research methodology, and management to real-world contexts strengthened my confidence and clarified how my skills could be used in practice,” she says.
As she completes her final course in the MLIS program, Harleen is less focused on a single, fixed career outcome and more interested in remaining open to possibility. While she is drawn to metadata and cataloguing work, she is equally motivated by broader questions about how information systems can better reflect and serve the communities they serve and support.
For Harleen, librarianship is a flexible and multifaceted path that reflects the diversity of her own experiences. Literature showed her ways to envision while libraries provide spaces to enact those possibilities. Through her careful work, she helps make libraries spaces of equity and inclusion.
---
Profiles in the Meet Our Students section are written by students in the Master of Media in Journalism & Communication program, who are enrolled in MMJC 9604 - Corporate Communications.
