At Work Upstairs

Institutional repositories have a mixed reputation and success levels and many of the difficulties Dorothea Salo outlined a couple of years ago are sadly familiar anyone who has worked in corporate digital publishing. New publishing systems are over-hyped, users are generally under trained, and disappointment always follows the expectations that content owners will maintain their own documents through a full life cycle. And let’s not talk about metadata much less file-naming conventions cause I might have flashbacks.

All the same, I confess a nerdy delight in sites like the Theses Canada, especially since it’s easy to identify which items come with downloadable files.  Reading the first chapter or two of a thesis can quickly give me a sense of the major arguments in a field and a list of  key texts I should work through.

My most recent IR find is from Simon Fraser where I was able to read a recent MA thesis by Anne Toews on Annie Buller and Beckie Buhay’s friendship (pdf).

Beckie Buhay (l) and Annie Buller (r) in the mid 1920s

Buller and Buhay were key figures in the early- to mid-twentieth century Canadian Communist Party (seen here sometime before 1929 in an image cropped from a Buller biography once downloadable from Progress Books).  References to their organization, writing, and management work are scattered throughout most accounts of the period. Detailed information that both places them and their friendship in context and adds  accurate information grounded in the historical record is much harder to find.

The combination of Google and Simon Fraser’s IR made it extraordinarily easy for me to find Toews’ work. And since Toews’ has done significant archival work, someday, if I find myself shaping a curiosity into a larger project, I’ll be able to find key records. That’s no a small thing when you’re interested in rather obscure topics.

There’s more work to be done of course—I still have lots of questions about Buhay—much I’m happy and grateful to have found and read Toews work.

Seventy-five years ago today, the leaders of the On to Ottawa Trek got on the evening train in Regina heading towards a meeting with an intractable R. B. Bennett.

Arthur Evans (2nd from left), Mike McCauley, James "Red" Walsh, Robert "Doc" Savage, Peter Neilson, Stewart "Paddy" O'Neil, Tony Martin, Jack Cosgrove (source: On to Ottawa Historical Society)

Not quite three days later, they arrived in Ottawa and cooled their heels at the Keewatin Hotel. This hotel is long gone but used to stand around the corner from the train station on Sussex South, roughly above the overpass that until recently was a good spot for sleeping rough in Ottawa.

The trekkers filled the time until their Saturday meeting with Bennett and his cabinet with meetings with representatives from various work camps, including the Rockcliffe camp (DND Work Camp Project 27 PDF).

Not surprisingly, the meeting with Bennett did not go well and quickly degenerated into insults of one sort or another. Bennett didn’t take kindly to be asked if he’d ever slept in a tar paper shack or eaten work camp food. Evans didn’t take kindly to being called a jailbird. Matters went downhill fast.

The Trekkers withdrew and help a rally at the Rialto Theatre on Bank Street where they called for a National Trek.  The Trekkers primary audience would have been comfortable at the Rialto which was located between Waverly and Frank. Refurbished in 1932 with a small neon sign, a cream and gold interior it sat 485 people. It owner at the time, A. Levinson, once remarked “I’m not selling movies, I’m selling a heated sheltered park bench for a dime” (See A Theatre Near You).  Since then the Rialto’s gone through multiple incarnations from seamy to high brow (see recent account for a sense of the streetscape then and now; and for oddly comic view, see an Ottawa Citizen piece on the Rialto’s reincarnation as an art house.)

Unmourned by the good burghers of Ottawa, the Trekkers retreated to Regina. The Trek ended badly but contributed to Bennett’s electoral defeat and the closure of the work camps. The Trekkers delegates went on with their lives. Walsh and Martin spent time in Spanish POW camps; O’Neil and Neilson died in Spain; Savage spent time in the merchant marine; Cosgrove and McCauley drop out of sight; and Evans carries on with his union and political work.

There are few left now who have first hand experience with the 1935 Trek.

CC licence

Most of the people who signed the title page of Arthur Evans’ biography are gone now but the anniversary of their efforts is reconfigured in a new trek to Ottawa in protest of homelessness.

Amazing what a slight shift in life circumstances can do for your perspective. This morning’s tech column on the radio was a near paen to Mastercard’s SmartCards

The combination of keyboard and online connectivity are being marketed as a method of reducing credit card fraud.  When a button on the card is pushed, the card produces a unique password that can be used once.

Passing over the inherent surveillance possibilities, I’m struck by a couple of accessibility problems with this type of device.

The teensy keyboard looks like it would be fertile ground for typos and frustration for anyone with the dexterity issues posed by garden variety changes that come with age.

More problematically the conceit of the card also relies on an invisible resource: the card holder’s short term memory.  The ability to remember patterned information (such as a phone number) diminishes with dementia and the likelihood that someone with even a mild memory problem will recall a random string of digits is small.  (Password systems in general wildly over-estimate people’s ability to remember random strings: there’s a reason why people hoard passwords on paper.)

A card such as this may indeed become part of a cashless society but it would also be a source of additional (and unneeded) frustration for people with less than obvious limitations.

Links:

• Credit card details and a press release
• Radio show
• Basic information about dementia in Canada

After the mad rush of house prep and sale (5 weeks end to end), we’ve entered a new stage of waiting. Since selling the house we’ve dashed to Halifax to find an apartment and returned with a lease in hand. We’ll be moving into a medium-sized apartment in a low-rise building on the north-west corner of the Commons. We’ll be on a well-travelled bus route but close enough to work, school, and shopping that we’ll be able to walk to most places.

While we’re still trundling things to the charity shop, this is an oddly idle time. The stoved-in garden shed is gone. The movers are booked. Furniture has gone to new homes. Spring yardwork is done. Utility cancellations are scheduled. Boxes arrive later this week. Each task completed inches us away from this house.

Soon enough the new owners will arrive and with a bit of weather luck they’ll arrive when the peonies are blooming and the house will have its first toddler of this century. I think she’ll like the echoes the place makes when it’s empty and she’ll soon figure out which of the fireplace tiles makes a satisfying clonk clonk sound.

I’m learning that selling a house has two major phases: the somewhat mad scramble to get ready and the somewhat maddening waiting as people look things over.

The first phase went quickly enough despite the miles and miles of baseboards that grew in the night and needed fresh paint in the morning.  Though I might have, well, did grumble at the process, it had its own satisfactions and was easy to measure: this much paint applied, these many books cleared away, and that much floor space revealed. All visible changes and all very much controllable.

The second phase is moving along as dozens of people troop through the house hoping it’s the right place for them, imagining their things in rooms that still hold a lot of signs of us, and if they look closely enough, the four families who lived here before us: Hoeys, Hicks, Petits, and Gomery-Powells.

The clearest signs come from the Gomery-Powells and the Petits though their colour palettes of green and beige have vanished under our yellows. The Hicks, we think, were the family that severed the land making way for our neighbours’ bungalow. The Hoeys were here from 1914 through the second world war when the house (with, yes, one bathroom) held seven adults during Ottawa’s wartime housing shortage. During the Hoeys time there were lilacs lining the back yard, peonies along the sunny side of the house, and a well out back where a maple tree now stands. The Hoeys and maybe the Hicks were here when there was a marshy area just beyond the dogleg in the road.

This is the hard phase of selling, with unsatisfying measures of progress: this many people at an open house, this many first showings, this many second showing, this many bookings coming up.  Very little remains in our immediate control as we can’t magic up a second bathroom, make the basement deeper, or get rid of the small apartment building you can see from the back porch. And much as I wish it, it’s hard to make people instantly love this old, well-loved, and well-used house but soon enough there will be lilacs,  bleeding hearts, forget-me-nots, and peonies.

When I was a kid the end of August brought the horror of new school shoes, the pleasures of new school clothes, and the excitement of the Provincial Exhibition.

Source: Lester Public Library

The Exhibition with its fancy poultry barns, pie booths, and midway was held in the neighbouring village: a little too far to walk when I was a kid but only a ten-minute ride in the car once we were all rounded up.

Perpetually denied candy floss, my favourite thing at the Ex was always the Tilt-a-Whirl.

We’re shaking things up chez nous. We’re selling our house, moving to Halifax, going to school (me) and finding a new job (him).

I’m alternately very excited about the prospects and nauseous: an oddly familiar feeling.

Found in a nook

I’m cleaning out nooks and crannies in the craft closet and found this pattern.

I’m alternately amazed and appalled by the hair, the headband which I just this moment notices, the gladiator sandals, and the blousy pants.

I must have bought this sometime in the eighties. The plan was to make the shorter version cause even then I had enough sense to know that a cabled mini-dress knit out of soft cotton would be unflattering on almost every woman and would be a baggy mess after one wearing.

Can’t decide which is more distracting: their hair or their feet?

Wait, it might be that one is in the girlie, crossed leg posture and the other one is in the sporty, wider stance.  Or is it the contrast between the belt-defined waist and the pleat-disguised belly.  Let’s just pass quickly by the buggy and steamboat in the title.




I’m torn: do I keep it as an example of eighties textile design or do I add it to the St. Vinnie’s pile.

Photo by spacmonster / CC

The number of books I read a year has held steady for the last two or three at just over a hundred—usually weighted toward recent “literary fiction” with dollops of comics, mysteries, history, and work-related stuff. I’m happy enough with the volume and the proportion: sometimes the bulk reading threatens to get out of hand — always a sign of too much going on at work —  but this year I’d like to try make some headway with books bought but not read.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was a gift that languished on my to-be-read shelves for little more than a year. I think I’d pop it into a light-reading category but it held my attention longer than I thought it would. It’s an epistolary novel and the switching between multiple points of view is done well. It’s a bookish book full of conversation about books and reading. The tone is buoyant if glowingly nostalgic. And as long as you don’t think too hard about the back story (war, concentration camps, slave labour, collaboration, resistance), it’s a good way to read away some hours, especially on a dreary day.

Suggested reading: Anne’s House of Dreams

Suggested counter reading: The Tiger Claw

The line-up for TCAF 2010 has just been published. Lots of names I recognize and lots of new-to-me names: the best situation for finding and buying and reading new comics.

A like the new site design too — especially the promise of a Floor Plan since its absence last year would have been my only complaint about the 2009 event. Well. Aside from the deluge.

How wrong would it be to start counting the days?

The recent spate stories about the Vancouver Public Library and VANOC sponsorships caught my eye. Disapproval seems widespread but this strikes me as a very ordinary moment in a public culture that is constantly enmeshed in corporate sponsorships. I seem to recall rather similar discussions about Pepsi logo’d cafeteria cups in a non-public workplace.

My guess is that the VPL memo is a fairly ordinary piece of internal communications.  And VANOC’s intervention, whether direct or indirect, and its attempt to control the flow of money is equally ordinary. A quick Google search will turn up dozens of examples of VANOC’s vigorous objections to non-official (ie, non-paid for) linkages between the games and commercial or charitable organizations.

The thing that puzzles me though is the idea that libraries would solicit food donations for in-house programs.  As well it’s not clear to me whether the Olympic-inspired guidelines are tightly connected to the VPL’s publicly posted sponsorship policy. Supporting Coca Cola over Pepsi or McDonald’s over Wendy’s: does this “undermine the integrity of the non-commercial public space”?

Suggested Reading:  No Logo.