The mapping of geographic names recorded in the head tax database was launched in the fall of 2008 by the Asian Library.  It took 20 rounds of community–based meetings with Taishanese and Zhongshanese-speaking participants to match the towns and villages of origin reported by 90% of immigrants from these two counties with the geographical names in Chinese scripts.  The results were released in May 2010 at the “Workshop on the Taishan and Zhongshan Immigrants in North America”.

The workshop inspired Rudy Chiang, one of the workshop participants to match the towns and villages of Sun Woy (Xinhui 新會) District found in the Head Tax database.  Out of the 13,000 immigrants from Sun Woy, he successfully matched more than 7,100.  On January 26th, Thursday, the Asian Library organized a workshop to celebrate Rudy’s research findings and his hard work in recapitulating the early Chinese Canadian history. Click here for Rudy’s Powerpoint presentation.

When more resources are available, mapping should also be conducted for Kaiping (開平), Panyu (番禺), Enping (恩平) and Heshan (鶴山), the remaining major sending counties. For more information on this project, please click here or contact Asian Library.

Currently, on the EBSCO eBook platform you can download ebooks off-line. Unfortunately, as the majority are single-user ebooks, this means no one else can access the ebook for 7 days. In order to make accessing fairer to all, we will be temporarily suspending off-line downloading on the EBSCO eBook platform later this week.

This move also brings EBSCO ebooks more into line with ebrary ebooks: single-user ebrary ebooks cannot be downloaded off-line either (multi-user ebooks on ebrary can).

The ability to download, email or print .pdf pages or sections (in most cases up to 60 pages) on EBSCO eBooks platform should not be affected.

January 30, 2012. 11:52 am • Section: Report Card

By Janet Steffenhagen

Young people interested in a teaching career need to know there are three applicants in British Columbia for every one position that becomes available in the K-12 school system, says Education Minister George Abbott.

“We need to be honest with students … about where their opportunities in the future may lie,” the minister said in an interview after a stalemate in teacher bargaining raised questions about whether B.C. needs to match higher salaries in other provinces to retain teachers.

Abbott says that’s not a concern because there are 2,700 to 2,800 teachers looking for work in any given year but only about 800 job openings in schools. The over-abundance of teachers is an issue Abbott said he intends to raise with the Association of B.C. Deans of Education (ABCDE) during a meeting set for spring.

The teaching pool includes new graduates from B.C.’s nine teacher education programs as well as teachers who have moved to B.C. from other jurisdictions. According to the most recent statistics available, the former B.C. College of Teachers certified 824 teachers who moved to B.C. from out-of-province in 2009-10 and issued 475 statements of standing for B.C. teachers relocating to other jurisdictions.

Abbott acknowledged that an education degree provides students with skills that can be used for other types of work but said it’s important for students to have the facts about job opportunities, given labour shortages in other fields.

Until he discusses his concerns with education deans, Abbott declined to comment on whether his government would consider a cap on enrolments in teacher education programs. “It would be premature for me to form any conclusion,” he stated.

Read full article here.

By Janet Steffenhagen, Vancouver Sun 

jsteffenhagen@vancouversun.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Please join me for a live, online workshop on Wednesday, February 1st 9:30 – 10:30am.

Web of Science is a multidisciplinary database that indexes over 10000 journals and offers powerful search options, including:

• refining results by subject, author, source, year or country
• tracking how often an article has been cited and the articles that have cited it
• creating search alerts via email or RSS

Its companion tool, Journal Citation Reports can be used to find the impact factor of a journal to identify highly cited journals in a discipline.

This session is offered online.

• To register, please go to: http://elred.library.ubc.ca/libs/dashboard/view/2919
• To join the class, go to: http://ubc.wimba.com/launcher.cgi?room=Web_of_Science
• To ensure your set-up is correct, please see: How to Prepare for an Online Class
• If you need help once the class has started, phone 604.822.4440

Questions? Contact sally.taylor@ubc.ca

Your eyes are not playing tricks on you. Yes, our cIRcle home page received a slight makeover yesterday as a kick-start for 2012!

About the Features:

You will notice that the previous Features such as the “Image Carousel” (images linked to news items), “News” (latest cIRcle & UBC news highlights), and “Did you know?” (quick facts about cIRcle & more) are still available. But, we have updated our “Top 3 items” listing to the “Top 3 downloads” (most frequently downloaded cIRcle items) of the past 7 days.

About the Functions:

We have all of the previous Functions as before and have added a few more that will help you explore and enhance your own scholarly research.Improved “Browse” and “Advanced Search” functionality

Our 2012 makeover aims to enhance the user experience with the improved “Browse” and “Advanced Search” functions.

Under “Browse”, you can now browse “By Dept. Affiliation”, “By Thesis Program”, “By Campus (for Theses)” categories. Under “Advanced Search”, a few more search types have been added to facilitate your searches thus enabling you to find cIRcle items more easily. The new search types are by: “Dept. Affiliation”, “Thesis Copyright Date”, “Thesis Program”, and “Campus (for Theses: UBCV, UBCO)”.

We hope you will enjoy your scholarly research experience using cIRcle, UBC’s Digital Repository at: https://circle.ubc.ca/ and don’t forget to send us your questions or comments to: ubc-circle@interchange.ubc.ca. We would love to hear from you!

Did you know?

As of today, cIRcle has over 39,000 items! You can check the growing number anytime by clicking on “Issue Date” directly under the “All of cIRcle” section under the “Browse” category on our cIRcle home page.

Above key image is courtesy of Brenda Starr’s Creative Commons Flickr photostream at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brenda-starr/3509344100/in/set-72157617806022838

The SAE Digital Library access is not working for the moment. We are talking to the vendor and hope to get this sorted soon.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Stay Tuned.

Modernize Tailors featured on Global News

Modernize Tailors is a Vancouver institution, having been operating in Chinatown since 1913. The business and the two brothers who run it, Bill and Jack Wong, was recently featured on Global News:

read more

Join us at Authorfest on Thursday February 2, 2012 Hebb Theatre, 2045 East Mall, UBC Campus, Vancouver 4:30-6:00 pm.

This year’s Authorfest features BC children’s authors Linda Bailey, Robert Heidbreder and Ellen Schwartz. You will also meet other wonderful BC children’s writers Tanya Kyi, Kathryn Shoemaker and Julie Burtinshaw.

It promises to be a wonderful event. Come and bring a friend!

~from the Vancouver Children’s Literature Roundtable website.

Reference requests rushed in last week. Asian Studies’ new year party attracted many people. I could only stood at the back for a short time. A white student asked for some ghost stories from Ming so he could compare with Liao Zhai. I just assumed he wanted English translation, until he confirmed that he really wanted to read the original scripts from China. I am glad to see the growth of non-heritage students at the party and the library.

Worked on Saturday and still receiving “happy New year” greetings in Engling-Cantonese and other languages. One Chinese student complained about hearing “kung hei fat choy” so often this time of the year, and it shouldn’t be considered as typical Chinese new year greetings. Sigh, what can I say?

Hard to believe that our students want to perform Peking Opera in English. Translated scripts, costumes, make-up, lots for them to learn before they can put up a show, but they are keen on real Jingju. Our traditional script translations are too old, but we do have a few. Thanks to Ye Ding’s personal experience and referral. Dr. Elizebath Wichman-Walzac, Chair of Theater Department of University of Hawaii, seems to be the pioneer in performing Jingju in English in North America. From 1985 onwards, she translated, directed and performed one Jingju play every four years. The famous ones such as Phoenix Returns to Nest (the script was published), Jade Hall of Spring, Judge Bao, The Yang Family Generals, etc. She directed remarkable performances. Wonder if she has published her script translations.

January 15, 2012 

- by Chris Kennedy - Author of cultureofyes blog

I have used the above slide in a number of presentations to make the point that British Columbia is leading Canada (perhaps even the world) in the professional use of social media in K-12 education. I freely admit I don’t have the statistics to back up the claim – there are simply more teachers, administrators, parents, trustees, and others here, who are logging into their blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts in the name of professional learning, than any other jurisdiction.

In the past year we have moved from several dozen blogs around K-12 education, to numbers in the hundreds, with representation in every area of the education system.  The #bced tag on Twitter is one of the most engaged with conversations about the ever-changing education profession, and there are many other social sites having these conversations as well.

The conversations around the profession itself are very interesting.  In social media, ‘role’ becomes less important; there is a flattening of society and it is ‘ideas’ that have increased value.  There are also incredible opportunities  to reflect, share, and learn without the limitations of geography. I could go on, and there have been many others who have covered the ground about the value of social media for educators, and how Twitter and blogging can be extremely powerful in professional development.  This is true for those interested in education in BC, but it is also true of other professionals around the world.

So why has BC moved so quickly and taken such leadership in this area? As mentioned, I have no statistical proof, but a series of ideas as to why BC is the leading jurisdiction using social media to engage in the profession of education.

Read full article here.