Posted in BCLA conference, collection development on June 8, 2008 | No Comments »
Thanks Heather De Forest and Janis McKenzie for convening this session. Thanks also to Heather for this writeup of this session that has become a BCLA conference favourite!
The Ain’t on the Globe and Mail Bestseller List session runs as a non-stop series of lightning-fast book (and other format) reviews, presented by a panel of [...]
Posted in collection development, public library, sex on February 26, 2008 | 2 Comments »
In the fall I went to the Metrotown branch of the Burnaby Public Library. I had heard rumors of a “purple dot” collection so I decided to find out more. The reference staff were lovely and explained that many of their instructional sex books and photography books were behind the circulation desk. [...]
Posted in collection development, events, zines on November 23, 2007 | No Comments »
Thank you Boing boing for being an interesting, informative time sucker. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t have learned about the new zine library at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Thanks Alicia Nauta for taking photos and letting us know how the launch went:
I began collecting the zines in [...]
Posted in LGBT, collection development, queer, social inclusion on October 26, 2007 | No Comments »
Patrick Califia is one of my all time favourite writers. Thanks Jen for clipping this from Xtra West for me. He writes:
When I came out, the first place I headed to to find out about my sexuality was the library and thank god there were librarians who were opposed to censorship and kept [...]
Posted in Little Sister's, collection development on October 16, 2007 | No Comments »
Some great news today — SFU Library’s Special Collections has acquired the papers (quite a few boxes) relating to the Little Sisters Bookstore legal cases. While it will likely be some time before they are organized and accessible, it’s really fantastic that these documents are going to be housed and made available to researchers.
Posted in collection development, media concentration on September 20, 2007 | No Comments »
This past summer, according to the BCLA site:
BCLA has written to the Secretary General of the CRTC (the regulator of Canada’s broadcasting and telecommunications), in response to a call for submissions on the diversity of voices in the Canadian media. BCLA’s contribution asks the CRTC to establish a market domination cap and break up concentration [...]
Posted in challenged books, collection development on September 17, 2007 | No Comments »
Meg Holle, a student at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), recently alerted students in the Public Libraries course at SLAIS about an intellectual freedom issue brewing in public libraries serving large Muslim communities in London, England. Meg wrote:
A report by the Centre for Social Cohesion, a right-leaning think tank, has determined [...]
Posted in BCLA conference, IFC, collection development on August 24, 2007 | No Comments »
I first got involved with the intellectual freedom committee (IFC) by presenting on the Ain`t on the G&M panel at the BCLA conference.
Here`s the rationale behind presenting lesser known materials, often from small independent publishers (from the IFC page):
For the past three years, members of the BCLA Intellectual Freedom Committee and other librarians committed to [...]
