Community Archives Workshop in Los Angeles

For any readers who are in Los Angeles – or more broadly as a discussion prompt for anyone interested in community-based archives
I’m helping to coordinate a workshop on skills for community archives on Saturday, March 1st, at the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research (SoCal Library), located at 6120 S. Vermont Ave., Los [...]

Brand Sponsorship of YA Novels?

As a major YA novel fan, this made me want to cry.
A NYT article this week discusses what happened with the innovative and bestselling “Cathy’s Book” and what is in the plans for a new tween series, “Mackenzie Blue.”
After Running Press/Perseus Books, publishers of Cathy’s Book, revealed that they had agreed to have the characters [...]

Is Microsoft learning to share? Yeah, right…

I first read about Microsoft announcement to release Windows code in La Jornada, a Mexican newspaper. Microsoft hace públicos los códigos de programación de Windows [Microsoft makes public the programming code for Windows]. By the time anybody reads this post, this will be all over the news (see CNET News, BBC, CBC, CNN) .
These seem [...]

Greater Victoria Library Lockout

This type of library website might be an all too familiar sight for residents of British Columbia, one of four Canadian provinces without pay equity legislation.
Just a few months after Vancouver librarians returned to the job after a strike, Greater Victoria’s nine public library branches are now closed indefinitely, leaving the public without services [...]

Social Justice in The American Archivist (!)

I’ve been home with the flu, which has provided time to catch up on some reading (ok, also television. But that’s not for this blog.) The latest issue of The American Archivist crossed my desk about a week ago, and I was pleased to see an article worth writing about here: Randall Jimerson’s “Archives for [...]

Toward a Canadian National License to the Cochrane Library

Calling all Canadians!
The Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre (CCNC) has created an online petition asking the federal government of Canada to purchase a national license to the Cochrane Library, a cornerstone of evidence based medicine, that includes their famous collection of “gold standard” systematic reviews of health interventions.
The Cochrane Library, as health librarians will [...]

Caffeine & Miscarriage News: Health Reporting or Marketing?

You may recall that a week ago there were a gazillion headlines proclaiming that even low levels of caffeine had been confirmed to cause miscarriage. A typical headline was something along the lines of “Caffeine doubles miscarriage risk.”
As a health information professional and a women’s health professor, I was frantic to track down the [...]