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I attended OLA * for only one day this year, partly because I'm already missing so much work for bargaining and other union business, and partly because one day is often enough. There's a huge lineup of presentations, poster sessions, book signings, vendors, keynote speakers, tours, receptions, etc. - lots of etc. - but the presentations are the meat of the conference. Four presentations a day for three days is just too much. As it happened, three of the four talks I attended shared a theme: bringing library services to underserved, marginalized, and socially excluded communities. My first of the day was Choosing to Walk a Path: Library Services with Indigenous Peoples on Purpose . Monique Woroniak, from Winnipeg, a city with a significant indigenous population, first set the social and political context. It was a bit like being at our annual socialist conference: the presenter using the expression the Canadian state , as opposed to Canada , and speaking about settler colonial

How do we know that the oxygen exists, and that oxygen is different from carbon dioxide? Well, we know it because we've been taught those facts. But how did that knowledge enter the scientific record? Air is invisible to our eyes. How did humans first understand that invisible gases exist, and have predictable properties? Answering that question, The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by science historian Steven Johnson, is at its most interesting. The body of experiments that led to the "discovery" of oxygen, carbon dioxide, the properties of gases, and other foundational principles of chemistry were completely unknown to me. (Indeed, I doubt I had ever considered the question.) This book introduced me to one Joseph Priestley, considered the father of modern chemistry, and a towering thinker of his era, yet largely unknown to the public today. As Priestley was a contemporary of several of the American "founding fathers

When this came out, I hung the cover on my bedroom wall.   Sharing memories of David Bowie, as so many of us were after his too-early death this week, led me to think a lot about the world I lived in when I was a big Bowie fan. My world then I saw Bowie in concert in 1976, after the " Station to Station " album came out. I was a few months shy of my 15th birthday. I had a picture of him on my wall, a magazine cover with a green background. I had assumed it was the cover of Time , but a Google image search quickly revealed it was People . No one in my family read People , which means I bought the magazine for the Bowie story and photos. Although I can't remember anything specific, I know I would have cut out, read, and saved anything about the new album and the tour from Rolling Stone  (still an actual rock music magazine), The New York Times , and Time , because I subscribed to RS and my parents subscribed to the others. In those days, we searched for images and stories a

For my work with my library workers' union, I schedule a lot of meetings. Various people can or cannot attend various meetings. We all use different calendar/agenda/diary tools, so sending an Outlook appointment, like we do in our workplace, isn't an option. As meetings approach, I receive emails from team members, telling me they can or cannot attend, often changing from one to the other. I was having a hard time keeping track of who to expect at what meetings. I knew there had to be an online tool to help with this. I use Doodle all the time for scheduling, but that wasn't quite right. I didn't feel like asking on Facebook, because I wanted to get a sense of what was out there, not just what was popular at the moment. At first, Googling "online tool for meeting attendance" turned up attendance-management tools like this , or event registration tools like this . But after a few searches, I hit on "online tool to track rsvps", and found exactly what

When we travel, we've always had someone stay over in our home with the dogs. In almost 30 years of dogs, we only boarded our dogs once . It was not a good experience, and we never did it again. Also, for many years, our schedules also required a dogwalker. So we're accustomed to paying for quality, personal care for our dogs. Now, however, we've come to the end of the road with dogsitters and dogwalkers. For many reasons, that won't work anymore.* Fortunately for us, times have changed. These days you can find quality doggie daycare in almost any city, and the low-rent kennel is a thing of the past, at least in major metropolitan areas. Friends told us about ParK9 , located near Toronto Pearson Airport, and we stopped by for a visit. The facilities are amazing, and the care sounds top-notch. The catch was the price. We've always tried to be generous when paying for dog-care, but the fees at ParK9 were well out of our range - more than twice what we would normally p

Whatever your mood this holiday season I wish you a year full of joy, love, and good health... ...friendship, peace, and solidarity.