Ally Week Display at the Notre Dame Campus Library

Today we begin our annual recognition of Ally Week here at Red River College.

• Ally Week is a time for us at Red River College to acknowledge all 325 of our College Allies, along with an additional 73 community Allies.
• Ally week is a time to thank our Allies for who they are and for helping to make our College and our communities a welcoming space for all of us, not just some of us.
• Ally week is also a time for us to commit to being better Allies.

Friday Sept 30th is Orange Shirt Day

One way Red River College is celebrating Ally week is by working with Indigenous Education and Student Support to recognize Orange Shirt Day. Orange Shirt Day occurs annually on Sept 30th and recognizes the harms done to our Indigenous communities, friends and family by the Residential School System.

Allies interrupt oppression whenever they see it, hear it or experience it. Residential Schools were tools of oppression. During this time of truth & reconciliation Red River College can take the day to affirm our Ally’ship with our Indigenous & Two Spirit communities.

Learn More

Drop by and check out the displays at the libraries both at the Exchange District & Notre Dame Campuses.

For information on Ally Week, visit : http://www.glsen.org/allyweek
For information on Orange Shirt Day, visit http://www.orangeshirtday.org/

Contact

For information on becoming an Ally or our LGBTT* Initiative please contact  the Red River College Diversity Initiatives Coordinator, Bradley West.  bcwest@rrc.ca,  204.632.2016

We would like to take this opportunity to wish Paddy Burt, Library Director, warm wishes as she retires from Red River College and starts a new phase in her life. We thank you for all you have done to advocate for the Library and lead us in the right direction. You certainly will be missed.

Here are some photos of Paddy’s retirement party, held on Sept. 15, 2016:

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Check out our photo highlights of yesterday’s mini-golf tournament at Red River College Library, Notre Dame Campus. A big thank-you goes to Bettina Allen for planning the event and to all of the staff who volunteered. This was a lot of fun and we look forward to hosting mini-golf again.

Highlights of RRC Library Mini-golf Event (Slideshow)

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On June 1, the Red River College Library, Notre Dame Campus, held its first annual mini-golf tournament. A big thank-you goes to Bettina Allen, and all of the Library staff who volunteered to make this day a success. Lots of participants came into the Library to play, and a great time was had by all! We look forward to holding another mini-golf event soon.

Photos of the Mini-golf Event:

The month of February is all about affairs of the heart. This Valentine’s Day, while you are taking time to remember your sweetheart, always remember February is the month where the Heart and Stroke campaign asks you to remember the perils of heart disease.

February is Heart Month

Heart disease and stroke take one life every 7 minutes, and 90% of Canadians have at least one risk factor. Heart Month is the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s key opportunity to reach millions of Canadians in February and alert them to the risks of heart disease and stroke. Volunteers are the face and the voice of the Heart and Stroke Foundation and Heart Month is a critical time when we depend on you to share our message.

In February, the “Heart and Stroke Foundation”  began a national canvassing campaign. The success of this program depends on its 100,000 volunteers, who make friendly, personal requests to their neighbours and online networks. Volunteers canvass for donations through the month of February, to support life-saving research and raise awareness of heart disease and stroke within their communities.

Notre Dame Campus Windows Display

Look for a “Heart” themed display in the showcase window just outside the Notre Dame Campus Library. As well you can check out some related items in our Library Collection. We have placed several of these items in our Notre Dame Campus window display.

“Poppies by Benoit Aubry of Ottawa” by Benoit Aubry  (Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Make remembrance more than something you feel. Make it something you do.

Each year, from November 5 to 11, Canadians join together to celebrate Veterans’ Week – this year is no different. During this week, hundreds of commemorative ceremonies and events will take place across the country to recognize the achievements of our Veterans and honour those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

This Veterans’ Week, take the remembrance challenge. There are many ways to show that you remember and honour our Veterans. Visit the Veteran’s Week Web site for more information.

As well you can check out some related items in our Library Collection. We have placed several of these items in our Notre Dame Campus window display. Have a look when you come by, or check out the list of items here: http://library.rrc.ca/Search/Window-Display.aspx

In Flanders Fields : the story of the poem by John McCrae

Included in our window display is “In Flanders Fields : the story of the poem by John McCrae”.  In May 2015 the poem “In Flanders Fields,” will mark 100 years since it was written. This special edition book serves to celebrate that anniversary.

Over the years, John McCrae’s poem has been recited by many generations who continue to cherish the underlying message of respect for the fallen and a longing for peace.

In this book, the lines of the celebrated poem are interwoven with fascinating information about the First World War (1914-1918) and details of daily life in the trenches in Europe. Also included are accounts of McCrae’s experience in his field hospital and the circumstances that led to the writing of “In Flanders Fields.”   (Goodreads.com)

Lest we forget.

Check out the window display at the Notre Dame Campus Library.

Ally Week is a national youth-led effort empowering students to be allies against anti-LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) bullying, harassment and name-calling.

It is usually held in September or October, often coinciding with National Coming Out Day on October 11, and October also being LGBT History Month. The event started in October 2005 and has grown since. This year Ally Week takes place October 12-16, 2015.

The goal of Ally Week is to diminish stereotypes and exclusion while highlighting that peer support for LGBT students is stronger than the students themselves may have thought existed. People across the country can engage in a national dialogue about how everyone in and out of school can work to become better allies to LGBT youth.

Visit our the Notre Dame Campus Window Display

To increase LGBTT* awareness Library Services set up a window display at Notre Dame Campus where you can find additional information about the LGBTT* initiative at RRC. As well, 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.

List of Items: http://library.rrc.ca/Search/Window-Display.aspx

Please note: In this year’s art contest, unfortunately no entry met the criteria listed. As a result, we have not awarded a prize. We hope for a better outcome next time! (Updated 7 Dec 2015)

October is Canadian Library Month. Show off your artistic talent by creating a Library poster or bookmark!

The poster or bookmark should represent one of our many services such as the Library databases, reference help, etc. (See the guidelines below for complete details). Need ideas? Unsure what we have? Ask our staff! They would be happy to show you anything from how to log into databases to requesting books from Exchange District or Notre Dame Libraries.

Please make your entry colourful, creative, and be sure to include one of our organizational logos: (Library Wordmark Image | Red River College Logo Image) If you can free hand the logo with colored pencils have fun, or dust off Photoshop/Publisher for those with digital wizardry. If going the digital route, make sure anything used conforms with copyright restrictions. In other words, images must either be original or in the public domain.

Keep in mind the winner(s) may find their creation is actually used by the Library for promotional purposes!

Contest Rules/Guidelines

• Open to all students
• Size
  • 11 X 17” full colour poster,
    AND/OR
  • 5 X 8.5”  2-sided, full-colour bookmark
• Topic: pick one of the following themes:
  • Extensive E‐book collection
  • Online Full-text Databases
  • Streaming Videos
  • Great Reference Desk help
    e.g. one-on-one research assistance; tutorials, etc.
  • Library (general ‐ must be specific to the RRC Library)
    e.g.  “Did you know our library offers …”
• Use any media (i.e. coloured pencils, digital media, mulmedia, etc.) and style of art
  MUST BE YOUR ORIGINAL ART WORK – NO CLIPART
• Write your name, student numberand email or phone number clearly on the back of your poster or on the envelope for bookmarks.
• All submissions must be turned in to either Library location by:
  4:30 pm on Friday October 30^th, 2015.
• Entries will be judged on:
  1. Quality of work
  2. Creativity
  3. Use of chosen topic
  4. Accuracy and clarity
• Winning artwork and honourable mentions will be displayed in the Library and on our website. They may also be used for future promotions.

Contest frequently asked questions

• How many posters/bookmarks can I enter?
  • One poster, one bookmark (total of 2 entries)
• How big can the poster / bookmark be?
  • Posters are to be 11×17” (tabloid)
  • Bookmarks are to be 2.5×8.5” and should have a front and a back.
• Do I have to use the RRC or Library logos? If so, where can I get them?
  • It’s encouraged. The logos can be downloaded here:
    (Library Wordmark Image | Red River College Logo Image)
• Can my entry be black and white?
  • We prefer full colour – unless your artistic vision says black and white!
• Will I get my project back?
  • We have kept all entries in the past. If you would like your entry returned to you, please say so on the back of the poster or on the bookmark envelope. Please note that winning entries will be kept for some time regardless.
• Can I make a poster on a topic not listed?
  • If it fits within the rules (our decision), then it’s OK.
• Can I ask staff about the different services for more information?
  • Absolutely!
• What goes on my entry?
  • Your name, student number, phone or email. If you want your entry back you should state this as well.
  • Please print clearly. If we can’t read it, we can’t contact you.
  • Information for bookmarks can be put on an envelope so that the original art isn’t damaged.
• Do you have envelopes for posters?
  • Nope, put your information on the back.
• Do you have envelopes for bookmarks?
  • Ask us.
• Does my bookmark need to be printed double-sided?
  • It can be submitted in two parts (front and back) on paper as long as it conforms to the size specified.
• Can I use 3-dimensional media?
  • The winning entries may be reproduced into promotional materials for the library. To do this we need to be able to make copies. 3D may limit our ability to do this at a reasonable cost. We won’t say no, but you should also submit a 2-dimensional print of your entry.
• When does the contest close?
  • Oct 30 at 4:30 – nothing will be accepted after that.
• When will we learn who won/honourable mentions?
  • A week or two after the contest ends.
• Who will judge the contest?
  • Library staff will be the judges.
• What are the prizes?
  • Tim’s card, Red card, or Bookstore credit for $50.
• Do we supply paper? Anything else?
  • Supplies are on you.
• What do you mean by copyrighted material/clipart?
  • Anything that someone else has created – e.g. downloaded from the internet, clip art from MSWord, photocopies, etc. Your entry must contain only original art created by your hand.
• What materials can I use to create a poster?
  • Pencil crayon, pencil, ink, digital media, multimedia, etc.
• Where can I find information on Canadian Library Month?
  • cla.ca

The Library will once again be participating in the Sustainable Living EcoFair.

We are hosting a Book Exchange – bring in your gently used books and exchange them for others that are new-to-you. Or donate them to the Library’s ongoing Recreational Reading Book Exchange – we are always looking for new titles!

Everyone who participates in the exchange may enter a draw for an eco-prize.

And, get rid of your clean plastic bags at the same time! Swap a dozen or more for a re-usable Library bag.

The event will be held on:

• Notre Dame Campus: Monday, April 20, 2015 from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
• Roblin Centre: Wednesday, April 22, 2015 from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

For your convenience, books may be dropped off in the Library before the event.

Poetry reaffirms our common humanity by revealing to us that individuals, everywhere in the world, share the same questions and feelings. – United Nations World Poetry Day Page

In celebration of World Poetry Day (March 21), I decided to take the chance to feature some of the items that can be found in the RRC Libraries digital collection. If you need instruction on how to use our EBSCOhost e-book collection check out this blog post we did explaining how to use the E-Book collection.

I like poetry, but I tend to have a hard time pinning down the titles and collections I want to read when in a book store. E-Books offer the perfect ability to browse and find something you like out of a superior selection to what you will find on (or what would fit on) a shelf. From a quick online browse of the collection, I pulled a list of about 30 titles I liked. All were worth featuring on this blog post. I couldn’t manage to par it down to less than 11 titles even though I was only planning to feature 10.

A quick search of the E-Book collection under the subject ‘poetry’ gave 6,907 titles for me to browse through. There is a lot discover, all of which is available free to students as part of the RRC online collection.

With the rise in popularity of formats like graphic novels you see a current demand for shorter reads. Poetry browsing and reading makes for a quick study break for students, so take a shot at browsing our E-Books collection to find what you like.

To get you started, take a look at the following list of titles that cover quite a range of interests, you’ll find Love Poems for Supervillains, anti-hero busboys, post-apocalyptic worlds, compelling descriptions of nature, the complexity of human relationships, and the outcomes of human actions explored in these collections of poems. Happy World Poetry Day!

Doom : Love Poems for Supervillains

Love Poems for Supervillains is an edgy and erotic investigation of comic book bad boys. These poems employ a language that is highly technical and dense, but it becomes witty, intimate and even tender in its specificity. These poems address the results of abuses of power and taken together present a case study in the pathology of villainy… – Google Books

American Busboy

In American Busboy, a wry anti-mythology, the anti-hero busboy in an anonymous Clam Shack! tangles with the monotonous delirium of work, the indignities and poor pay of unskilled labor, the capricious deus ex machina of mean-spirited middle management, the zombified consumption of summer tourists, while jostling for the goddess-like attentions of waitresses and hostesses—all battered up in sizzlingly crisp wit and language, and deep-fried in a shiny glaze of surrealism. —Lee Ann Roripaugh –Google Books

Creamsicle Stick Shivs : Poems

John Stiles’ first collection of poetry, Scouts Are Cancelled, explored the dialect and the dilemmas of down-home life in Nova Scotia’s rural Annapolis Valley. In his second collection, the poet expands his horizons. Chronicling his movements from Canada’s east coast to Toronto’s self-obsessed urban core, following his heart around the world to find love and employment in England, these poems resonate with profound ideas and offbeat observations on people and place, on the variables that combine to create a person’s identity, and what it means to leave, to seek, and to desire a home.Alive with Stiles’ distinct linguistic charms and poetic good nature, Creamsicle Stick Shivs is a book of subtle inventiveness and undeniable roguish delight. – Google Books

Immortal Sofa : Poems

In accessible poems full of rich detail and painterly images, Maura Stanton looks under the surface of the ordinary, hoping to find the magic spark below the visible. In poems both humorous and elegaic, she gathers strange facts, odd events, and overlooked stories to construct her own vision of immortality, one made up of fragments of history and geography and the illusions of yearning human beings. From elephants in Ceylon to Nazi prisoners in Ireland, from Beowulf to Jane Austen, from sonnets to prose poems to blank verse, Immortal Sofa conjures our complex existence in all its sorrowful but astonishing variety. – Google Books

Mister Martini : Poems

Spare yet evocative, the poems in Mister Martini pair explorations of a father-son relationship with haiku-like martini recipes. The martini becomes a daring metaphor for this relationship as it moves from the son’s childhood to the father’s death. Each poem is a strong drink in its own right, and together they form a potent narrative of alienation and love between a father and son struggling to communicate. – Google books

Tiny, Frantic, Stronger

In Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, Jeff Latosik considers states of durability and longevity in an age of ephemeral mores and instant gratification. Probing the pressure points where notions of physical, psychological, and technological strength continually threaten to erupt into their opposites, these poems ask which aspects of our daily lives might actually last beyond the here and now, beyond their own inherent limitations of time, person, and place. –Insomniac Press Publisher

Little Black Daydream

Wry, spry, entrancing and intelligent, the poems of Little Black Daydream invite us into a richly imagined future: not just post-apocalyptic, but post-everything. What a haunting, dark, and oddly comic world, where inhabitants “fashion hobo bags out of surplus Che Guevara tee-shirts / and fill them with the molars of the dead,” and where “the Secretary of Consolidated Debt tells his sons each morning: / when I was your age, no independent clause.” We wake from our Little Black Daydream bolstered by our imaginative sojourn in this precisely rendered world. This book is a major accomplishment.
–Beth Ann Fennelly, Unmentionables

Voodoo Inverso

In this debut collection, Voodoo Inverso, Mark Wagenaar composes a startling mystical imagism and sets it to music, using self-portraits to explore differing physical and spiritual landscapes. He uses a variety of personae—a victim of sex trafficking in Amsterdam, a fichera dancer, a portrait haunted by Dante, a carillonneur of starlight, an elephant in pink slippers remembering its beloved—to silhouette the intricacies and frailties of the body and the world. In a series of “gospels” and “histories”—such as the poems “History of Ecstasy” and “Moth Hour Gospel”—he shines a light on the possibilities of transcendence and transfiguration, weaving together memory and loss with desire and hope. – Google Books

Hagiography

… Currin’s poems present thought as a bright, emotionally complex event, a place where mind and sense and the natural world they move through become indistinguishable elements in a mysterious, familiar, vexing, fascinating, and continuous human drama. There are no saints in this hagiography only ghosts, sisters, spiders, birds This is an anti-biography. It starts with death and ends with birth. In between: life after life. – Google Books

Li’l Bastard : 128 Chubby Sonnets

…Li’l Bastard is a collection of ‘chubby sonnets’ – sixteen-line poems organized in eight twenty-poem sequences – that explore the poet’s obsessions and engagements with America and Canada, popular culture, love and death, aging, baseball and beer and Barnaby Jones. Adopting a wild array of tone and artistic strategies, from picaresque to fantasy, to observational humour and the simple song lyric, these poems map the poet’s midlife crisis on a wild flight that touches down in Montreal, Chicago, Nashville, Texas and Los Angeles. Poignant and often achingly funny, Li’l Bastard will no doubt cement McGimpsey’s status as a beloved and ever-surprising original. This work was a Finalist for the 2012 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. – Google Books

The Porcupinity of the Stars

In this much-anticipated new collection, poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the “Utne Reader” has noted, what makes this work ‘so compelling is Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.’ “The Porcupinity of the Stars” sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder, and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness. His Heisenbergian sensibility honed to a fine edge, the poems in this bright, bold and intensely visual book add a surreptitious intensity and wry maturity to Barwin’s trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion, and invention.”