Caron’s LAC Modernisation message: huh?

(aka the blog post wherein I probably blow any and all future chances of working in government…)
Making the rounds of Canadian LIS (and presumably archives) listservs today has been Librarian and Archivist of Canada Dr. Daniel Caron’s “Message from the Librarian and Archivist of Canada: Modernization.”
As far as messages go, it’s kind of an odd [...]

Librarianly committments + Privacy improvements = Facebook for me?

In my previous facebook post I said it would take 2 things to get me on Facebook (FB): trust and better terms of service (ToS, which FB now calls “Statement of rights and responsibilities”).
Since then, it has become likely that I will end up using FB as part of a KT (“knowledge trnslation,” aka making [...]

OLPC Give 1 Get 1 for 2008 launches Nov 17

Tipped off by the Digital Copyright Canada blog, I heard that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is gearing up to launch another “Give 1 Get 1″ (G1G1) campaign.
This is awesome, and I think I know a number of folks who were considering getting computers for young people for the holidays and might buy [...]

Tomorrow’s History & the Role of Public Libraries

I’ve been thinking about digitization and history; specifically the trusim that history is written by the victors (aka the privileged), and what that means for our current era.
With literacy and war-conquests-slash-oppression on the part of literate groups, orality became devalued as “official” history in most of the mainstream, dominant, Western societies.  Non-literate or illiterate people [...]

Another one bites the dust: Publish & Perish

A press release from January 7 announced that Raincoast Publishing will soon bite the dust. Apparently this branch of Raincoast Books has been brought down by a stronger Canadian dollar (and the soon-in-sight end of the Harry Potter bonanza), they have decided to kill their publishing program in order for their wholesale/distributing business to stay [...]