Category: Service
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Thoughts on Canada’s Draft New Plan on Open Government
Last week the Government of Canada released the latest draft of the new plan on Open Government, and I thought it was pretty good reading! Here are some of the things I learned, or highlighted as particularly interesting: Canada was recently ranked 4th out of 92 countries by the World Wide Web Foundation’s Open Data Barometer which…
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Fun with OpenDataSoft – Mapping Calgary City Amenities
Earlier this month I happened across a blog post from a company called OpenDataSoft (ODS) in which they described how they put together and mapped a list of over 1,600 Open Data portals around the world. I thought that was pretty cool, and did a little exploration of their web-based platform and decided to try my…
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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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Identifying and avoiding predatory publishers: a primer for researchers
My colleague Rob sent a link out about this new 2-page brief from the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL): Identifying and avoiding predatory publishers: a primer for researchers (pdf). So-called predatory publishers are those that lack discernible scholarship, academic rigour or credibility. They use aggressive practices to recruit authors and editors. Predatory publishers’ opaque operations and editorial processes…
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Screencasting iOS
A few days ago TechSmith released a new Labs tool called AppShow which is intended to allow developers to record demos of their iOS apps to include in the App Store. Just about the same time, Amit at Digital Inspiration posted how to do the same thing using QuickTime player. I finally carved out a…
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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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Westmount Charter School Calendar 2014/2015
Inspired by Peter in PEI, I went ahead and transcribed the PDF of the official Westmount Charter School (in Calgary) 2014/15 Calendar into Google Calendar and iCal formats so you can actually import them into the calendar of your choice, rather than have to read a PDF. Google Calendar iCal format Update – August 18,…
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Open Sourcing the Wellcome Library
I've had this open in one of my tabs for weeks, and just haven't made the time to play with it further, but it's definitely worth checking out – so go do it! The Wellcome Library ("We are one of the world's major resources for the study of medical history. We also offer a growing…