Latest issue of the Courier

One of the volunteer roles I took on this role was serving as co-editor of the Courier, a newsletter produced for members of the Toronto Chapter of SLA. The position gives me the opportunity to work with a variety of writers and meet new people in the profession. I am happy to report that the latest issue, Volume 47, Number 3, Spring 2010, is now available on the SLA Toronto website.

Here is the Editor’s Letter I wrote for this edition:

Our second issue of 2010 is one of the biggest and best we have ever seen. As usual, the Courier remains the best place to stay informed about the activities and accomplishments of the chapter’s members and leadership. This issue also contains reports on one of the Chapter’s latest events — Dine-Arounds, a wonderful way to combine dining with professional development.

This issue also benefits from a number of first time contributors ranging from student members to librarians. The winners of the 2010 FPinfomart Student-to-Conference Award, Elysia Guzik and Shannon McMillan, have included their statements in this issue. Katya Pereyaslayska and Sandy Iverson both explore the topic of education from different angles. Dana Craig and Peter Duerr of York University explain how GIS technologies can be used to cope with disasters and emergencies. The breadth and variety of these contributions should make for a very stimulating read.

Please enjoy the issue and keep sending in the great contributions!

2009 issue of Informed is available

The 2009 issue of Inforumed, the alumni magazine of the Faculty of Information (University of Toronto), is now available. I wrote some of the short articles for this issue as a member of the Alumni Association. I am excited by some of the research happening there and appreciate that the magazine offers a venue to connect with some of these projects. You can access the high-resolution PDF of the magazine online for free. The person pictured on the front cover of the magazine, shown above, is Professor Matt Ratto who has created a “Critical Making” class. I didn’t take that class as a student, but it definately looks creative and interesting. As I understand it, part of the class involves creating physical items to manifest abstract concepts (e.g. one assignment was to create “an ethical machine” and I gather that somebody made a STOP traffic sign as a result).

New article: ‘The Sun was Obscured by the Smoke of Books’: Libraries and Memory Institutions in Conflict Since the End of the Cold War”

Issue three of the Faculty of Information Quarterly is online. Now you can read my article, “‘The Sun was Obscured by the Smoke of Books’: Libraries and Memory Institutions in Conflict Since the End of the Cold War” (HTML version or PDF version). This paper was originally created as a conference paper, then submitted in a course and then it became this article. The thesis, in brief, is that war and other conflicts reveal much about the role of libraries and other cultural institutions (and how society is badly weakened and damaged when libraries are damaged).

Interviewed for “Special Issues: Bulletin of the Canadian Association of Special Libraries and Information Services.”

I was interviewed for an article in the latest issue of CASLIS’s (CASLIS is a division of the CLA) publication, Special Issues: Bulletin of the Canadian Association of Special Libraries and Information Services Vol. 19 No. 1 (2009). Last summer, I had the opportunity to volunteer in CASLIS Ottawa to organize events for students working in the Ottawa area. There are several interesting articles in the issue such as advice for those attending conferences. If you are looking for the section involving me, that is on page 7 where I am interviewed with several other students.