Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Hosted by UBC Reads Sustainability Lecture Series, and held at the Liu Institute of Global Issues, Steward Brand has been an environmentalist for over 40 years, and shares his wisdom in his new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. His book is a compilation of his reflections and lessons which suggest a shift in the environmentalists’ dogmatic approach, and describes a process of reasonable debate and experimentation. His iconoclastic proposals include transitioning to nuclear energy and ecosystem engineering, and are sure to provoke widespread debate. He has helped define the collaborative, data-sharing, forward-thinking world in which we live. Brand is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Global Business Network, the Long Now Foundation and the Well.
Eliza Dresang – Project VIEWS: Early Learning Initiatives That Work Successfully (or Do They?)
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS). Abstract: How do we know whether early learning initiatives in which public libraries are involved work? That is, what is the impact on early learners? Dr. Eliza Dresang, the Early Learning Public Library Partnership, and the Foundation for Early Learning in Washington State have joined forces to address this challenging topic through Project VIEWS, funded through the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Dresang will give an overview of the early learning assessment research landscape in Washington. She will then speak to the related research in which she is currently involved and the potentially ‘radical’ idea of how she will adapt her research with school-age children to an early learning audience, based on a general principle she holds for research involving children.
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Dresang, E. T. (1997). The resilient child in contemporary children’s literature: Surviving personal violence. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 22(3), 133-141. [Link]
Dresang, E. (2006). Intellectual freedom and libraries: Complexity and change in the Twenty‐First‐Century digital environment. The Library Quarterly, 76(2), 169-192. doi:10.1086/506576. [Link]
Dresang, E. (2005). The information-seeking behavior of youth in the digital environment. Library Trends, 54(2), 178-196. [Link]
Dresang, E. T., & Koh, K. (2009). Radical change theory, youth information behavior, and school libraries. Library Trends, 58(1), 26-50. doi:10.1353/lib.0.0070. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
UBC Photographic Society – My Everyday
UBC Photographic Society
George Buchanan – Supporting the Reading of Digital Books
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS) and the Digital Information Interaction Group. Libraries have traditionally stored large volumes of physical documents, and, in recent years, this has been supplemented by an increasing proportion of digital texts. Whilst there has been an extensive research into the reading of relatively short documents, there is a surprisingly limited detailed knowledge of how longer digital documents are found, chosen and read. With the emergence of Kindles, iPads and other portable digital devices that have a major or sole purpose of supporting reading, it is timely to re-investigate the use of longer electronic texts, such as digital books. In this talk, Dr. Buchanan will report the key findings of a four-year research project that has addressed the selection and reading of digital books, and suggest a number of avenues for future investigation.
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Hagen, O. A., & Ebrary Academic Complete (Canada) Subscription Collection. (2010). Digital books: Competition and commerce. Hauppauge, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers. [Link]
Goldsborough, G. (2005). Digitized books versus digital books. Manitoba Historical Society.
Bernstein, A. L. (2009). World book digital libraries. Library Media Connection, 28(3), 102. [Link]
Rosenthal, S. (2011). Lerner digital interactive books. Library Media Connection, 29(4), 102. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Annabel Lyon
Annabel Lyon’s most recent novel, The Golden Mean (Random House Canada, 2009), animates the relationship between the young Alexander the Great and his tutor Aristotle. It won the 2009 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Annabel’s previous work includes the short fiction collection Oxygen (McClelland & Stewart, 2003), a suite of three novellas, The Best Thing for You (2004), and the juvenile novel, All-Season Edie (Orca Books, 2008). She lives in New Westminster, BC.
On the orders of his boyhood friend, now King Philip of Macedon, Aristotle postpones his dreams of succeeding Plato as leader of the Academy in Athens and reluctantly arrives in the Macedonian capital of Pella to tutor the king’s adolescent sons. An early illness has left one son with the intellect of a child; the other is destined for greatness but struggles between a keen mind that craves instruction and the pressures of a society that demands his prowess as a soldier. Exploring this fabled time and place, Annabel Lyon tells her story in the earthy, frank, and perceptive voice of Aristotle himself. With sensual and muscular prose, she explores how Aristotle’s genius touched the boy who would conquer the known world. And she reveals how we still live with the ghosts of both men.
Annabel Lyon read at the Parliamentary Room of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre on September 16, 2010.
Steve McNutt – Volcano Lightning
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the Earth and Ocean Sciences Department. Steve McNutt is a volcano seismologist who works part time for the Alaska Volcano Observatory. He coordinates volcano seismology research for the UAFGI, and presently supervises two PhD students, a Post-Doc, and two full time employees. His research interests include studies of source and propagation effects for volcanic tremor, low-frequency events, and explosion earthquakes; volcanic hazards assessments in Alaska, California, and Central America; and the mechanical behavior of volcanoes, including periodicity of eruptions, and the effects of earth tides, sea level variations, and tectonic stresses on triggering eruptive activity. Since July 1999 he has served as Secretary-General for the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior.
Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library
Grunder, A., & McNutt, S. (2005). Assembly focuses on volcanism and societal impacts. Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union, 86(18), 178. doi:10.1029/2005EO180004 [Link]
Lu, Z., Dzurisin, D., Biggs, J., Wicks, C., & McNutt, S. (2010). Ground surface deformation patterns, magma supply, and magma storage at okmok volcano, alaska, from InSAR analysis: 1. intereruption deformation, 1997-2008. Journal of Geophysical Research -Solid Earth, 115. doi:10.1029/2009JB006969 [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Mark Wexler – Sam Sullivan Public Salon Series
Mark Wexler is Professor of Management Ethics & Management at SFU and a renowned expert on ethics. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library
Wexler, M. N. (1987). Conjectures on the dynamics of secrecy and the secrets business. Journal of Business Ethics, 6(6), 469. [Link]
Wexler, M. N. (2006). Successful resume fraud: Conjectures on the origins of amorality in the workplace. Journal of Human Values, 12(2), 137-152. doi:10.1177/097168580601200203 [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
UBC Photosociety Exhibit "My Everyday" at IKBLC Gallery, Nov 1-18th.
The UBC Photosociety is hosting a photo exhibit entitled “my everyday” at the Irving K. Barber Learning Center Gallery from November 1 to 18, 2010, and will host a reception on Thursday, November 4, 2010 from 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm. This exhibition will display work done by members of the UBC Photosociety that deal with their daily lives, and the ways that those lives intersect with university life.
The idea behind this exhibit is that photography is often the process of capturing the lives of others—be they family members, friends, co-workers, models, or people in the community—but photographers do not often think through the ways in which their praxis mediates their own experience of reality, or the ways in which this capturing provides an illusory sense of their world as objectively theirs. For the exhibit, my everyday, emerging photographers have captured the things they see, do, are inspired by, and frustrated by in their everyday lives as students and members of the university community, as a means of both encouraging and denying fellow-feeling with others. Thus, the exhibit will allow for a theorization of the “everydayness” of university life—a life all too often described as alien to the “real” world—but at the same time will encourage the viewer to see that everyday life is best understood in terms of a plurality of perspectives.
Featured town: Bella Coola at IKBLC
In a new series of blog posts, Rare Books and Special Collections will be featuring a historic document, photograph or map related to one of the B.C. towns represented in the room names of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Receipt from A.C. Christensen & Son, Bella Coola
To kick things off, we’ll start with Bella Coola which is a small town on the Central Coast of B.C. The Bella Coola area is famous for the MacKenzie Rock, where in 1793 Alexander MacKenzie wrote his name on a rock to commemorate completing the first recorded journey across North America. In the early to mid 20th century, the Bella Coola area was home to the Tallheo Cannery, which is where our featured document comes from. The Tallheo Cannery was built in 1912 by the Canadian Fishing Company. The archives of the Tallheo Cannery include administrative records such as correspondence, financial documents, and fishermen’s statements. The document shown is a receipt for purchases made by the Cannery from a Bella Coola store, A.C. Christensen & Son, who were dealers in “dry goods, boots and shoes, hardware and groceries.”
In the Barber Centre, the Bella Coola room is number 193, a meeting room on the first floor of the building.
Check back every two weeks for another B.C. town and another historic document!
Bella Coola room, Barber Centre(written by Sarah Romkey)
Kim Baird – Sam Sullivan Public Salon Series
Tsawwassen Chief Kim Baird is leader in the First Nations treaty process. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.