In the June 15^th Winnipeg Free Press, it was discussed (http://tinyurl.com/n6f3f7r) that some government emails are irreversibly deleted. Keeping digital records is important because they provide evidence of how government conducts its business.

Good recordkeeping requires a lot more effort than just ensuring crucial records are not deleted, whether intentionally or not. Essentially, digital records need to be maintained so that they can be accessible and usable over time. Physical artifacts may exist for thousands of years, and paper records could stay for decades, but digital records do not have such robustness. Digital carriers have short longevity, both media and file format obsolete in fast fashion (see Chamber of Horrors), digital data is vulnerable to damage (see Atlas of Digital Damages), can be altered with great ease, all of which could render digital files unreadable in a few years. Stated simply, digital records won’t survive benign neglect.

One might think about printing out and keeping paper records instead. This is definitely not an ideal solution—the benefit of digital format such as links, searchability, and certain functionalities will be lost. Digital records need to be refreshed and migrated on an on-going base. Till today, migration is the most commonly used digital preservation method followed by emulation. Neither of them is straightforward and can be costly. For example, when files are transferred to a different format, errors could be introduced. When it comes to proprietary software, when the vendor is out of the market, support is likely to be discontinued.

Digital preservation is at its infancy. Strategies and methodologies are yet to be developed! One thing is certain–we need to consciously and actively maintain our digital records to avoid leaving a black hole in our society’s collective memory.

With the Winnipeg Jazz Festival right around the corner (and down the street) from June 13 -23rd why not get in some early jazz listening.

Check out the Naxos Music Library – Jazz available on the Library’s website.

Thousands of tracks of jazz from over 2,300 albums.  Search by artist, genre and composer. Simply log in to the Naxos Jazz website and search for your favourite jazz artist or jazz track. Create your own playlists.

How to get there:

1. Go to the Library’s website.
2. Go to Article and Databases – Alphabetical – Naxos Music Library – Jazz.
3. Log in with your College username and password.

More music can be found in the Naxos Music Library – the world´s largest online classical music library with over 85,000 discs and 1.2 million tracks.

In the meantime, check out Jazz Festival Headliner, George Benson’s “Breezin’” track: http://redriver.naxosmusiclibrary.com.athena.rrc.mb.ca:2048/jazz/stream.asp?s=152963%2Fredrivernmlj3%2Fsz7323%5F001

The Canadian Libraries Association annual conference is being held in Winnipeg this week. Red River College is well represented as several staff members are attending, taking advantage of the proximity of this years conference.

The annual CLA conference draws participants from public, college and university, special and school libraries, as well as commercial participants. It is an important and well attended conference.

So, what was discussed?

A DRM “Brave New World”

Cory Doctorow – Opening keynote speaker CLA 2013 Winnipeg

On Thursday 30 May 13, the keynote speaker was the well-known science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist Cory Doctorow.

As well as being the the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net) he is also a regular contributor to The Guardian, the New York Times, Publishers Weekly and Wired. He is an activist in favour of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization. In fact, he publishes much of his work under a creative-commons licence.

In his keynote address Doctorow spoke about DRM and how it is affecting our privacy and freedoms. For example, he described how DRM software can be used to take over our computers with hidden files and even introduce spyware.

One of his messages to the Librarians in the room was to avoid purchasing materials with DRM, and essentially join him in his advocacy against DRM.

At one point he made reference to the monetizing of smart phone tracking data, something government agencies usually regard as a harmless act, downplaying the tracking data as benign information. Doctorow’s opinion, in contrast, “there is a very fine and philosophical line between data and metadata.”

Doctorow spoke of the fact that our society should be moving towards greater transparency and digital freedom. However, as Doctorow pointed out, we actually seem to be moving closer to a darker age where governments and corporations can reduce our privacy at will, even going as far as turning on our digital cameras for the purpose of spying on us.

It was an wonderful presentation. Doctorow proved to be engaging and his topics were thought-provoking and extremely timely, as he astutely pointed out, our copyright legislations are currently under large scale review.

McLuhan, Books & Libraries: An Old Figure in a New Ground

Dr. Robert K. Logan from the University of Toronto presented several recollections of conversations with McLuhan. As a past colleague of McLuhan his knowledge of the man seemed peerless.

As well, doing his best to channel McLuhan, Dr. Logan described how he is endeavouring to answer several burning questions about the future of libraries in an effort to write a new book about the subject.

FrankenLibraries: The Latest Tech Trends

Presented by Stephen Abram, a veteran library watcher, strategic technologist and library futurist, the topic centred on services libraries should be adopting for present and future relevance.

One of the first slides in Abrams presentation was “It’s simple really, shift happens, gedoverit (sic)”. This terse statement summed up the topic very well.

One of the important points of the presentation was how libraries need to measure impact rather than just circulation statistics. In fact, the number of people passing through the library doors should be a powerful indicator of success, while dwindling circulation statistics should be considered to be less indicative.

As well, libraries need to focus on professional services and strategic alignment. Librarians need to be service professionals and not servants, and educators not supplements. He pointed out that Librarians are powerful agents for successful learning and they should be seen as such.

Lastly, Abrams stressed the power of video resources. He pointed out that humans are visual learners and they will learn better through video rather than print.

Stephen Abram’s Blog: http://Stephenslighthouse.com

A National Library Event

Library staff from Red River College Library are geared up for the CLA 2013 National Conference and Trade Show taking place May 29 – June 1, 2013. Thousands of library professionals from Canada and the U.S. will gather at the Winnipeg Convention Centre to network and to learn about the latest trends and developments in the world of libraries.

Introducing the CLA 2013 Conference Keynote Speakers…

CORY DOCTOROW
photo by Jonathan Worth (JonathanWorth.com), Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Cory Doctorow 
(http://craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing (http://boingboing.net) and the author of the bestselling Tor Teen/HarperCollins UK novel LITTLE BROTHER. His latest young adult novel is HOMELAND, his latest novel for adults is RAPTURE OF THE NERDS.

Source: http://craphound.com/bio.php

REBECCA MACKINNON
photo by Joi [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Source:
http://rconversation.blogs.com/
about.html

Check out some of the items that are currently on display in the Notre Dame Campus window display

Please join the Red River College Library in a respectful observation of May 17th, the International Day Against Homophobia.

May 17 is symbolic due to its significance in the improvement of the status of gays and lesbians. In removing homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses on a May 17, the World Health Organisation put an end to over a century of homophobia in the medical field.

Homophobia is all the negative attitudes that can lead to rejection and to direct or indirect discrimination towards gay men, lesbians, and bisexual, transsexual or transgender people or toward anyone whose physical appearance or behaviour does not fit masculine or feminine stereotypes.

The theme of the International Day Against Homophobia 2013 campaign is “Fight the Homophobia Web Virus”.  For more information visit http://www.homophobiaday.org

Also, keep in mind that the The Pride Winnipeg Festival is coming up soon.  “Pride Week” is a multi-day celebration with many events for all segments of the LGBTT* community, all leading up to the main PRIDE DAY celebrations which will occur on Sunday June 2, 2013.

Do you want to learn more?  The RRC Library has many LGBTT* themed items in its collection. Check out some of the items that are currently on display in the Notre Dame Campus window display.

Bruce Locken, the MALT “Library Support Worker of the Year” 2013

The Manitoba Association of Library Technicians (MALT) has recently awarded Bruce Locken (Library Media/Circulation Clerk)  the “Library Support Worker of the Year” award for 2013.

The intent of the award is to recognize a library support staff member who has demonstrated outstanding professional achievement or leadership in their library, or in the library community at a local, regional, provincial or national level.

Bruce, who has served RRC for 25 years at both the Exchange District Campus and the Notre Dame Campus was recognized for his excellence in custom service, efficiency, cheerfulness and  his sense of humour.  Over the years he has developed excellent working relationships with faculty and staff who have come to rely on him for their frequent media bookings and to provide assistance by troubleshooting equipment problems in classrooms .

Aside from his regular duties as Media/Circulation Clerk, you may have also have spotted Bruce in a daffodil hat and vest, and selling bunches of daffodils in support of the March “Daffodil Days” fundraiser for the Canadian Cancer Society.    Library Staff are also more than familiar with Bruce’s efforts to coordinate one or more of the RRC Library Christmas Cheer Board hampers each year .

We all feel that it is a privilege to work with Bruce, and we’d like to congratulate him.  He is a very worthy recipient of the MALT Library Support Staff of the Year award!

Many of us use search engines.  In fact, a search engine is often the first place a user heads to when they begin their online session. However most people are not experts and they probably use a search engine in its simplest form.

I’m here to tell you that Search Engines will do much more than you think, and we have posted a handful of really cool tips below that we just know you will love!

Please note that in these instructions we are primarily referring to Google.  However these tips will work in other search engines such as Bing.

Let’s get started!

Searching an Explicit Phrase:

Lets say you are looking for content about the Winnipeg Jets.  Instead of just typing Winnipeg Jets into the Google search box, you will likely be better off searching explicitly for the phrase “Winnipeg Jets”.  To do this, simply enclose the search phrase inside quotation marks.

Example: "Winnipeg Jets"

Excluding Words

Lets say you want to search for info about Justin Trudeau, but you want to exclude the results that may be included that have info about Justin Bieber. Simply use the minus (-) sign in front of a keyword you want to exclude from your search results.

Example: Justin Trudeau -Bieber

A Site Specific Search

Often, you want to search a specific website for relevant content.  Even if the site doesn’t support a built-in search feature, you can use Google to search the site for your term. Simply use the “site:hostname.com” modifier.

Example: Winnipeg Jets site:winnipegfreepress.com

A Synonym Search

Let’s say you want to include a word in your search, but you also wish to include results that contain similar words or synonyms.  To do this, use the tilde (~) character in front of the word. For example, you could search for “Winnipeg Jobs” and then also search for “Winnipeg Employment” and get two different results.  However if you search for “Winnipeg ~employment” you should get all results for Winnipeg and all synonymns of employment included.

Example: winnipeg ~employment

Searching for a Specific Document Type

Performing a Filetype Specific Search

If you’re looking to find results that are of a specific type, you can use the modifier “filetype:”.  For example, you might want to find only PDF files related to the Red River College:

Example: Red River College filetype:pdf

Searching for This OR That

By default, when you do a search, Google will include all the terms specified in the search.  If you are looking for any one of one or more terms to match, then you can use the OR operator.  Please note that the OR has to be capitalized.

Example: "winnipeg jets" OR "manitoba moose"

Conclusion

There are dozens of tips which can be used with Google, but this is all for now!  We will post more in a future blog entry.