Canadian Language Librarians’ Blog

Bob Huggins, the founder of Paper of Record, has secured Google’s permission to re-initialize Paper of Record for academic institutions. Access to the database will be by subscription only through academic portals. Please read the following article for more information on the importance of Paper of Record: http://blog.historians.org/news/771/paper-of-record-disappears-leaving-historians-in-the-lurch.

I have just discovered that Google has bought Canada based PaperofRecord.com’s Digital Historical Newspaper Archives containing 20 million digitized historical newspaper pages (many of which are in Spanish from Mexico). When I click on paperofrecord.com I get the Google News Archive search page. As far as I can tell much of the PaperofRecord content is not yet available on Google News Archive. Does anyone have more information as to the timeline for the 20 million newspaper pages to be searchable and viewable again?

The BRAZIL PORTAL is a comprehensive news aggregator. It covers Brazilian foreign and national affairs as well as environmental, economic, social, scientific and political issues in Brazil. The PORTAL is a non-partisan, independent project of the Brazil Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The information, commentary and analysis collected on this site is meant to broaden understanding of and interest in Brazilian public policy.

Tags: Blog, Brazil, Latin American Studies

I am the French and Multilingual Services Librarian at a central Ontario public library which serves a population of approximately 130,000 people including a growing number of speakers of languages other than English and French. 

I have to establish a policy on multilingual donations (languages other than English and French) which were arriving fast and furious before we established a temporary moratorium on such donations.  The library sees taking donations as an exercise in goodwill to the public yet many of these multilingual donations were being dumped in the garbage if we couldn’t use them, even though they may have been useful to someone else.  

Not only do we need expertise to deal with identifying, selecting and cataloguing the less than 10% of the multilingual donations which we retain, we need to have an efficient way of dealing with the 90% of the donations we don’t retain without offending anyone. (Ha!)  

Questions:

1) Have any of you used the services of community volunteers / non-library colleagues to assist in identifying, selecting and cataloguing donations?  How have you screened for language competency, knowledge of the literature, and knowledge about potential users of these donations when you yourself may have relatively little knowledge in these areas?

2) Do any of you sell off unusable multilingual donations singly (e.g. on E-Bay) or in bulk to jobbers?  I met an American librarian at the IFLA conference whose library does this.  Any experience in Canada? Which companies do you recommend?

I see from the posts that many of you are from academic libraries. If you have related experience in dealing with multilingual donations where there is no on-site expertise in the language, I hope you would share.  Any experience can be adapted to the public library setting.

Tags: donations, multilingual, policy, volunteers

This semester I am trying something new in terms of information literacy for my French subject area at the University of Alberta Libraries. I will be offering four or five IL sessions, depending on the course section, for French 301 (Introduction to Literature). The sessions will be based on University of Alberta IL programs that already exist at the Bibliothèque Saint-Jean and at Augustana. Students will have readings and assignments (annotated bibliography and research strategy hand-out) to complete for the sessions and I will be grading them on their performance.

Jean Franco, the renowned Latin Americanist will be visiting the University of Alberta campus during the week of October 1st 2007 and giving a series of lectures.  Here are the links announcing her lectures: http://www.events.ualberta.ca/details.cfm?ID_event=12476 http://www.events.ualberta.ca/details.cfm?ID_event=12477 http://www.events.ualberta.ca/details.cfm?ID_event=12478 

This message has been posted on the WESS Romance Language Discussion Group Listserv.The ACRL/WESS Recruitment to the Profession Committee invites you to participate in a study of North American academic librarians and their knowledge of foreign languages. We are researching the language skills of academic librarians, to what degree they use foreign languages in their work, and the perceived value of foreign language skills in academic libraries. Whether you know multiple languages or only English, your insight will be very valuable to us.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=384513643190 . It will be available until July 6, 2007.Your participation in this survey will be of great value to our profession, and we thank you in advance for investing your time!Best wishes,

http://www.tcnj.edu/~moulaiso/ < http://www.tcnj.edu/%7Emoulaiso/>Cataloging/Modern Languages LibrarianThe College of New Jersey

Email: Moulaison@tcnj.edu < mailto:Moulaison@tcnj.edu>

The Global Resources Network’s (GRN) report “Changing Global Book Collection Patterns in ARL Libraries” http://www.crl.edu/grn/papers/grn_global_book.pdf indicates that six (6) is a common holding average for France, Spain and Latin America.  Latin America, however, is slightly higher than 6 and the other two are slightly lower than 6 depending on the imprint years included in the average.

Here is the abstract as it appears on the first page of the pdf document above.

“The overlap of global book collections in member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), as exemplified by an analysis of nearly 28.5 million records in a July 2004 snapshot of the OCLC WorldCat database, is not as extensive as expected.”

“For all countries combined, excluding North America, the average number of ARL library holdings per bibliographic record is fewer than five, that is, fewer than five ARL libraries own copies of the book represented by the bibliographic record.”

“For each of ten world regions, excluding North America, the average number of ARL library holdings per bibliographic record ranges from a low of 2.99 for East Asian books to a high of 6.28 for Latin American books. That is, on average fewer than three and only slightly more than six ARL libraries hold any book that was published outside of North America.”

EuroDocs (http://eurodocs.lib.byu.edu) is a new portal to European primary historical documents.  Historians, archivists, librarians, and others who are aware of the primary sources of a given European country are invited to help build primary historical documentation online by requesting a password through eurodocs@byu.edu and contributing links to historical documents in facsimile, transcription, or English translation. Submissions are posted in chronological order for each country.

Bruno Racine is the new director of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF).  He is replacing Jean-Noël Jeanneney.  Bruno Racine is also a writer and has recently published a novel entitled Le Côté d’Odessa (Grasset, 2007).