Academic librarians and research: a response

Before you read this post, go here and read Mark Rabnett’s blog post, ““For academic librarians what’s hard to reach is time for research.”
I started leaving a comment there, but soon realised that my comment was likely to challenge the original post in length. Thus, I figured I’d just post a response here and link back. [...]

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 [...]

YouTube videos on CanWest info issues

I don’t have a television, but I do love to watch stuff on my computer.  Back in the last millenium, when I did have a TV, I didn’t have cable anyway, so I am easily impressed with the amazing diversity of media to which I have access via the Internet.
As you may have noticed from [...]

DOAJ: Continued Growth (plus a Creative Commons bonus)

Over at the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, librarian Heather Morrison has been tracking the Dramatic Growth of Open Access over the past couple of years in a series of blog posts.
On Friday, Morrison noted that the growth rate of the DOAJ (directory of open access journals) has almost doubled in the past year. She [...]

Free Speech and Patron Privacy are Corequisites for Intellectual Freedom

The book

So you’ve probably heard about this library assistant (Sally Stern-Hamilton, aka Ann Miketa) in small-town Michigan (Luddington) who wrote a fiction book (“Library Diaries”) based upon her accounts of library patrons, and published it under her maiden surname at a vanity press. The book doesn’t sound all that original or like it’s anything [...]

The Vancouver Sun parody & SLAPP

When I moved to Canada, I was shocked to learn that parody is not a specially protected form of speech here. It is in the US, and I like to think I made pretty good use of that principle over the years. You may already be aware of some of the freedom of expression [...]

POPLINE kerfuffle follow-up

The good news of the day is that Michael J. Klag, MD, MPH, Dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has released a “Statement Regarding POPLINE Database.”
In the statement he says he was just informed this morning about the blocking of searches for abortion in POPLINE, and that he “could not disagree [...]

POPLINE and government barriers to information on “controversial” topics

I saw it first at Rachel’s blog, but you may have seen it any number of places by now:

Making the rounds of librarian emails, listservs and blogs in the past day or so is the news that POPLINE, “the world’s largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, [...]

Internet literacy, three ways

Over the last week or so, I’ve been following very different, but equally interesting, threads about internet and technology literacy. Each offers a different slice of a wide problem, and I think comparing the three together presents interesting contrasts.
The first take on internet literacy comes by way of a colleague of mine who teaches classes [...]

Heads up: More on privatization of Canadian health information/care

Mark Rabnett has a lovely post up on his blog, Shelved in the W’s, on Tennyson, the CHN shutdown and two-tiered health systems.
Just as we have tiers to our health care system here in Canada – “medically necessary” care for all, but increasingly also pay-for-priority care for those who can afford it – so have [...]