Category: Ideas
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Calgary Public Library IdeaLab on Kickstarter
I picked up a bookmark at my local branch the other day, and just now followed the URL to a new Kickstarter project by the Calgary Public Library Foundation for IdeaLab. They're looking for $100,000 to help fund a makerspace-type area in the new Central Library currently being built. Kicktraq thinks they're only going to…
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Are you in NZ? Want a free book? NZ bans award-winning YA novel after complaints from conservative Christian group
I first heard about this on BoingBoing, and followed up with several other articles: Book case study – Into the River New Zealand bans award-winning teenage novel after outcry from Christian group Censorship is alive in New Zealand. I should know: my book was banned We read the novel New Zealand just banned for sex…
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What is a (public) library?
We have lots of conversations in my extended family about the role of the public library these days, and I happened across an interesting post from an unlikely source – the Kickstarter blog. In a post titled, Libraries are Everywhere, the author asks the following questions of four founders or employees of very non-traditional, yet…
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Designing libraries that are relevant in the digital age
Got a free 1/2 hour? Use it to listen to a recent episode of The Current, Designing libraries that are relevant in the digital age, which is mostly about the new Halifax Central Public Library. No mention of Calgary's new Central Library, but I guess that's 'cause it's not nearly so far along. Glass seems…
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Design presentation for Calgary’s New Central Library
I ended up not being able to attend this presentation in person, but there's now a nicely-edited video of last week's presentation on the design of Calgary's New Central Library. You can watch the preliminaries, but I recommend starting at the 8:15 mark where the interesting design discussion actually begins, IMHO.
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Open Government Tour 2014 – Calgary Stop
Yesterday evening instead of attending the prologue of the 2014 Tour of Alberta as I had planned, I found myself at the Calgary stop of Richard Pietro's Open Government Tour. I totally made the right choice! Over the past year I've found myself increasingly interested in both linked data and civic affairs, and this 3-hour…
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Thinking the unthinkable – doing away with the library catalogue (UKSG)
Here's a thought-provoking talk given by Simone Kortekaas of Utrecht University Library in the Netherlands at this year's UKSG conference. In it, she talks about how they decided to do away with their discovery tool and steer users to Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus. Utrecht appears to be a science-heavy institution. The title…
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An experiment in privacy and disclosure
"On April 29, 2014 the Interim Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Chantal Bernier, revealed that Canadian telecommunications companies have disclosed enormous volumes of information to state agencies." This lead sentence comes from Citizen Lab's recent post, Responding to the Crisis in Canadian Telecommunications. I heard about that post after listening to the most recent episode (#31) of Jesse Brown's…