British Columbia Historical Federation Publications are now available ONLINE HERE.

Titles included are:

• British Columbia Historical Association – Report and Proceedings:   1923 – 1929
• British Columbia historical news:   1968 – 2004
• British Columbia historical quarterly:   1937 – 1958
• British Columbia History:   2005 – 2007

Join the UBC GIS Users Group for three presentations about the use of GIS in health sciences research.

Neighbourhood Environment in Waterloo Region: Patterns of Transportation and Health
presented by Josh van Loon

Spatial Epidemiology of Lung Cancer in Canada: Examining the Role of Air Pollution and Neighborhood Deprivation
presented by Perry Hystad

Three Projects Applying GIS in Public Health
presented by Anthony Smith

• Mapping Local Social Barriers to Sexual Health Clinics in Two Rural Communities
• Provincial Emergency/Hormonal Contraceptive Use Through Time
• National Abortion Travel Patterns

The meeting will be held Wed. Feb. 29th at 3pm in Koerner Library, Level 2, rm. 216.

The UBC GIS Users Group meets monthly. For more information, please see: http://www.gis.ubc.ca

In British Columbia, the Day of Pink 2012 is celebrated on February 29. Check out this link from the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation for more information.

DayofPink is the International Day against Bullying, Discrimination, Homophobia and Transphobia in schools and communities. We invite everyone to celebrate diversity by wearing a pink shirt and by organizing activities in their workplaces, organizations, communities and schools.

It is a day where communities across the country, and across the world, can unite in celebrating diversity and raising awareness to stop homophobic, transphobic & all forms of bullying. 

The International Day of Pink (April 11) was started in Nova Scotia when 2 straight high school students saw a gay student wearing a pink shirt being bullied. The 2 students intervened, but wanted to do more to prevent homophobic & transphobic bulling. They decided to purchase pink shirts, and a few days later got everyone at school to arrive  wearing pink, standing in solidarity. The result was that an entire school stopped homophobic & transphobic bullying. 

The message was clear: anyone can bully, any can be victimized by bullying, but together we can stop it.

Why should you participate?

Have you ever seen a friend hurt because of discrimination? Have you been hurt yourself? Discrimination comes in many forms including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, agism and anti-semitism just to name a few. These social diseases create barriers, bullying, harassment, hate and violence. No one should have to experience the negativity created by discrimination. DayofPink is more than just a symbol of a shared belief in celebrating diversity – it’s also a commitment to being open minded, accepting differences and learning to respect each other.

~from the Day of Pink.org Website

Day of Pink Guidebook 2012

CKNW’s Pink Shirt Day Website

Perhaps you have heard about Faculty of 1000?  Open data & Cloud computing?

You might want to hear about Figshare.

“…Figshare is the brainchild of Mark Hahnel, who realised that a large amount of data generated during the course of his PhD would never get published as it did not show any significant difference. He also realised that redoing expensive research experiments and duplicating data could be drastically reduced by simply sharing this already generated data by putting it up in a proper format in a searchable database…” Singh, 2011 Figshare is a newly-relaunched web-based repository designed to enable researchers to share their research outputs in an easily citable, sharable and discoverable manner. Its platform is easy to use and aims to help researchers get credit for all their research (both positive & negative results), while moving knowledge forward. Figshare is supported by Digital Science, a sister company of Nature.

Figshare is a form of cloud computing enabling researchers to publish datasets, tables, videos, figures and other knowledge objects. All file formats are uploadable including multimedia, video and data, and information typically moved to the backs of papers in appendices or supplemental sections. Up to 1GB of data can be stored privately for free, and users have unlimited space for publicly available research.

Scientists and researchers can publish null results on Figshare, avoiding the file drawer effect while helping to make scientific research more available for the peer review process. Figshare uses Creative Commons to allow research data-sharing, while allowing researchers to choose when they want their data made public. Scientists are concerned about unfettered openness. As Professor Peter Murray-Rust of Cambridge says, “the primary purpose of publication for most academics is self-advancement”. Yet the notion of being secretive in scholarly work and scientific research is slowly breaking down.

Finally, Figshare focuses on giving users credit for all of their research; with increasing evidence for open access and its role in increasing impact, this is imperative. By using traditional impact measures (i.e. number of citations) with altmetrics, Figshare provides more depth, realtime measurements and a host of other benefits.

Follow on Twitter

https://twitter.com/#!/figshare

Reference

• Figshare: Interview with Mark Hahnel | Gobbledygook
• FigShare: striving for greater efficiency in scientific research. Claire Bowe
• Is the Open Science Revolution For Real? Wired Science 2012
• Singh J. FigShare. J Pharmacol Pharmacother. 2011 Apr;2(2):138-9.

The Osler Library for the History of Medicine at McGill University is Canada’s foremost scholarly resource in the history of medicine and one of the more important libraries of its kind in North America.

The Osler Library has a collection of 8000 works relating to the history of medicine much of it donated by Osler himself. In fact, Osler’s ashes are kept in the library as a memorial. The library’s website provides an overview of its collections and describes its holdings of archives, manuscripts, incunabula, portraits and artefacts. Online access to the Library catalogue is available through McGill’s central library catalogue. The site also provides easy access to the Osler Library newsletter and a range of other library publications, including the Osler Library Studies in the History of Medicine series. The newsletter is accompanied by an author and subject index. The site hosts a number of virtual exhibitions relating to the life of William Osler and the Osler Library.

The Osler collection is one of the most extensive in the world, ranging from Sumerian tablets to medieval Arabic manuscripts.

Holdings & services

The Library comprises a circulating/reference collection of secondary literature and journals on the history of the health sciences, as well as a collection of primary materials (pre-1914).

The collection of historic volumes assembled by the Library has grown to close to 100,000 volumes. The archives and manuscript collections are devoted to Osler and the history of medicine at McGill University, Quebec and Canada. Decriptions of archival collections can be browsed at http://osler.library.mcgill.ca/archives. Services included reference, interlibrary loan, image reproductions, tours, and a visiting fellowship for scholars. Databases have been developed to find our collection of almanacs (http://osler.library.mcgill.ca/almanacs) and reprints (http://osler.library.mcgill.ca/reprints/) and an index of Canadian medical obituaries (http://osler.library.mcgill.ca/cfstand/).

See also David S. Crawford, Famous physicians in history and William Osler

References

• Gray C. The Osler Library: a collection that represents the mind of its collector. Can Med Assoc J. 1978 Dec 23;119(12):1442-5.
• Lyons C. From Osler’s Library to the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal: an overview. Can Bull Med Hist. 2007;24(1):189-203.
• Lyons C. E-Resources at the Osler Library: special collections databases, the Canadian Health Obituaries Index File, and the Bibliography of Canadian Health Sciences Periodicals. Watermark (Arch Libr Hist Health Sci). 2006 Summer;29(3):65-6.
• Wallis F. Osler Library Studies in the History of Medicine. Osler Libr Newsl. 1990;63(February):1.

“Featuring plays from noted playwrights as well as lesser known dramatists, the collection includes works by over 300 writers including Amiri Baraka, Noël Coward, Susan Glaspell, Langston Hughes, Brian Friel, David Mamet, Eugene O’Neill, John Osborne, Sean O’Casey, Harold Pinter, Bernard Shaw, Neil Simon, Gertrude Stein, Tom Stoppard, Derek Walcott, August Wilson and Elizabeth Wong.” –Twentieth-Century Drama website

Take a look at ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey Twentieth Century Drama, on trial till March 31st.

LAW LIBRARY level 3: K1401 .I55273 2011 Steven Anderman & Ariel Ezrachi, eds., Intellectual Property and Competition Law: New Frontiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). LAW LIBRARY level 3: K3171 .G48 2011 James E. Fleming, ed., Getting to the Rule of Law (New York: New York University Press, 2011). LAW LIBRARY level 3: K4448 .W35 [...]

Just finished the conference paper, and found time to come back here. Several events related to international students in the past weeks. Minister Wong visited us last week and mentioned: “49 high schools in China using the Canadian high school curriculum, some of those graduates may come to UBC”.

Winnie brought a group of 15 students from the IGSPP program. On top of a regular orientation of the library collection and services, I was asked to help with their “soul searching about what they really want to do in terms of their academic and career planning. ” My personal experience as an international student and a foreign worker seemed to attract their attention and reduced our distance.

I am glad that many people on this campus are willing to help these kids far from home. Winnie, Lee Ann, Alden, etc. I was invited again to the networking session of Launch a Career in Canada. Enjoyed the chat with students from all over the world. Glad to see Charles whom I usually only get to see during new school year orientation. He suggested we work out more programs together.

Education Minister George Abbott has asked his staff to work through the weekend to prepare back-to-work legislation aimed at ending a labour dispute with B.C. teachers.

Abbott made the announcement Thursday after a senior official in the Labour Ministry concluded a negotiated deal was “very unlikely.”

“I am satisfied now that for the days, weeks and probably months ahead, a freely negotiated collective agreement is an impossibility,” he said. “I will be moving as quickly as we can on this.”

He said students are paying the price for the dispute and he can no longer “in good conscience” allow the job action to continue.

A back-to-work bill could be introduced in the B.C. legislature as early as next week.

Vancouver Sun full text article here.

By Lindsay Kines and Rob Shaw, Victoria Times Colonist February 24, 2012

lkines@timescolonist.com

rshaw@timescolonist.com

Click here to read more stories from The Victoria Times Colonist

Those who have used Rare Books and Special Collections comic book collections may be interested in trying out a new database that UBC Library is trialing: Underground and independent comics, comix and graphic novels is “the first ever scholarly, primary source database focusing on adult comic books and graphic novels. Beginning with the first underground comix from the 1960′s to the works of modern sequential artists, this collection will contain more than 75,000 pages of comics and graphic novels, along with 25,000 pages of interviews, criticism, and journal articles that document the continual growth and evolution of this artform.”

Rare Books and Special Collections collects comic books by several Vancouver-based comic book artists- you can access a list of these collections on our Ephemera Research Guide. If Vancouver comics are your thing, you can search the Underground and Independent Comics database for comics published in Vancouver, which will yield comics from two series: Fog City Comics and Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman.

After you check out the database, be sure to fill out the feedback form! The trial runs until March 16.