UBC Library now has access to World Constitutions Illustrated: Contemporary & Historical Documents & Resources via HeinOnline This resource is a growing collection of constitutional documents, books, periodicals, articles, bibliographic references and Web sites. Click here to view a full brochure for HeinOnline’s World Constitutions Illustrated library or click here to view a complete list of [...]

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UBC Library users have trial access to Sage Reference Online, a resource featuring the electronic versions of two hundred encyclopedias and handbooks in the social sciences. Material in the business and management collection includes coverage in the areas of advertising, marketing, business ethics, career development, global supply chain management, human resource management, leadership, leadership, organization studies, organization discourse, and workplace diversity.

Access is  available until May 15th, 2010.  Please share your feedback about Sage Reference Online through this form.

Two great new sites have just launched this month that will help Canadians have easier access to Federal government data.

openparliament.ca was launched on April 12th, by Michael Mulley, a Montreal-based web designer.  It provides a simple and attractive interface from which to find data culled from the Hansard (aka, official Debates) of the House of Commons.  You can browse by MP or search by name or postal code.  The main focus of the site is to keep citizens informed about the work of parliamentarians and its most useful feature to that end is its hyperlinked list of topics under current debate.  Are you curious to know what MPs were debating about most recently? According to Mulley, who has taken his information from the April 16th Hansard, topics included:

• ethics
• Afghanistan
• Fairness at the Pump
• sealing industry
• Canada Post
• agriculture
• Chile
• the environment
• wine industry
• and much more!

If datasets are your thing, check out http://www.datadotgc.ca/ Launched by David Eaves on April 14th, this site provides a home to a growing list of federal government datasets.  You can see which ministries share their data and which do not and you can see how many datasets each ministry has provided.  At present the lion’s share of available data come from Natural Resources Canada, but as the open data movement grows in Canada we will likely see more content added from other departments.   Supports keyword searching and you can browse by ministry or by tags.

K3702 .M4713 2009 (LC) Alexandre Miguel Mestre, The Law of the Olympic Games (The Hague: T.M.C Asser Press, 2009). KD703.D3 M38 2009 (LC) Law Reserve Harvey McGregor, McGregor on Damages, 18th ed. (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 2009). KD8420 .C75 2010 (LC) Michael Naughton, ed., The Criminal Cases Review Commission. Hope for the Innocent? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). KE4381.5 [...]

The BC Liberal Government has agreed to keep the funding for  3 of Vancouver’s emergency shelters:

• New Fountain Shelter (51B Cordova St.) – 28 beds, Portland Hotel Society
• Central Shelter (240 Northern St.) – 100 beds, Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre
• First United Church (320 Hastings St.) – 200 spaces, First United Church of Canada.

Read the story from the Globe and Mail here

Read the BC News Release here

The City of Vancouver just finished it’s Homelessness Count last month. Figures have been released;  however,  the full report hasn’t been released yet on the City of Vancouver site but archived years are available.

http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org/insideteaching/

Welcome to Inside Teaching. This website is designed to support a community of learning, which includes teachers, professional developers, and other educators interested in learning and in teaching. Visit collections of multimedia records of teaching practice. Learn from others’perspectives on using records of practice for teacher learning. Contribute your own teaching and learning experiences and browse materials and resources that reflect the larger context of the work featured here. This site itself is an environment of learning, a “living archive” that relies upon the contributions of visitors in order to grow and to thrive.

CENSUS MAPS The Atlas of Canada, produced by Natural Resources Canada, in partnership with Statistics Canada, presents a series of maps and accompanying analysis of national and regional data results from the 2006 Census. The third and last release focuses on educational attainment, location of study, the Aboriginal population, income, as well as age and marital status by gender. The maps are now available on the Atlas of Canada website

http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/featureditems/census_2006

Previous releases covered topics such as the Canadian population, age, marital status, immigration, visible minorities, mode of transportation, language, the labour force, and housing and shelter costs.

Students who use the David Lam Library use the facilities for a variety of reasons. There are groups who need to discuss and work on their assignments collaboratively, and there are individuals who need a quiet space to read, write or study. Because the library has a lot of shared, open space, the noise from group areas easily drifts into silent study areas. People entering or leaving the library often forget that they are moving in a space where others are working. People answering their cell phones often talk much louder than they realize. A friend walks by and starts talking to another friend in the silent study just for a minute but it still disturbs the concentration of their peers. We who work at the David Lam Library want the library to be a welcoming space, accommodating the needs of many different users, but we receive many complaints about noise. Staff respond to these complaints, but it is a constant challenge to balance the conflicting needs of our users.

Of course, we are not the only library that struggles with this issue. Emily Rueb, of the New York Times recently posted Some, but Not All, Savor Silence in the Stacks. The Bronfman Business Library, at York University, made an eloquent plea for the Sound of Silence.

At Lam, we’re known as a customer-focused library. With our Canaccord Learning Commons, we’re redesigning our space, and are confident that the new space will elegantly accommodate both the exuberance and the studiousness that characterize students at Sauder.

Interested in hearing Maher Arar’s testimony to the US House Committees on Torture?  Or watching Toyota executives testify before Senate?  Or perhaps you’d like to watch bank executives being grilled over the recent financial crisis?  Well you can watch all this and more on the C-Span Video Library website.

“Every C-SPAN program aired since 1987, now totaling over 160,000 hours, is contained in the C-SPAN Archives and immediately accessible through the database….”

Videos of Congressional sessions and committee hearings are posted alongside full-text transcripts of the events and a list of all participants.   Other types of content include press briefings/news conferences,  media interviews, clips of debates, ceremonies, public appearances, and even clips from foreign legislatures.  You can search for videos by “subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and location.”