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The Briarpatch is an alternative news magazine based in Regina (circa 1973) making creative use of folkosomies and participatory metadata.

Their latest free monthly newsletter the B-List posted this effort to collect progressive/political news and links from their readers.

Are you an online news hound? Do you use del.icio.us to tag your favourite articles? Then you’ve got what it takes to become a B-List stringer! All you have to do is tag the best articles you can find (radical, insightful analyses of current events and important trends) with the tag briarpatchb-list. We’ll do the rest! If you want more info, just drop us a line.

-PC-

Reposting from a MediaActive @ lists.riseup.net message.

The CRTC is in the middle of discussion media concentration in Canada - keep sending them the message that media diversity is what’s best for a democratic society.

******
SAY YES TO REAL COMMUNITY TV!

Please take a moment to support an independent, community-based
channel for Western Canada.

With private media in Canada held in so few hands, independent,
community-based media is as important as ever to increase media
diversity and give communities a voice.

The CRTC is about to review an application by the non-profit
Community Media Education Society (CMES) to provide a community
channel for Telus TV subscribers in British Columbia and
Alberta. This is the perfect opportunity to express your support
for independent community media.

http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/CRTC_cable/ekxgwu49edm55t

Please help CMES set a powerful precedent. We only have until October
5 to let the CRTC know that Canadians want community media.

Take Action Now:
http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/CRTC_cable/ekxgwu49edm55t

Visit the web address below to tell your friends about this.
http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/CRTC_cable/forward/ekxgwu49edm55t

Support Independent Community Media

For more information about this campaign and other work of Canadians For
Democratic Media visit: http://democraticmedia.ca

We need your help to effectively fight for public interest media policies,
support our work today!
http://democraticmedia.ca/donate

Steve Anderson
Canadians For Democratic Media
Co-ordinator

For more information visit: http://mediademocracyday.org

For open discussion on media reform use this forum: http://mediareform.ca

— Thanks, Steve Anderson

-PC-

So Shameless is the feminist magazine and blog for teens that I wish had been around when I was a wee feminist myself. I’d be dating myself if I told you how old I was when Sassy finally rescued me from magazine hell, so I won’t.

Not only are the contributors of Shameless smart, feminist, and yes - sassy - they also know how where the good activist resources are and how to find them. I quote from a recent Shameless blog entry from Tuval, one of their contributors:

Last night I watched an old film I’ve been meaning to see for a long time. And I got it from my favourite movie store, the public library.

That’s right - the public library. (Where you can also find a print copy of Shameless at a healthy selection of library branches.)

And the film in question is Not a Love Story, by Bonnie Sherr Klein, mother of activist Naomi Klein. Coincidentally, I viewed this film about the same time I was reading Sassy.

Do check out (no pun intended:) both of Sherr Klein’s films, Not a Love Story and the more recent, Shameless: the Art of Disability.

-PC-

Let as many people as possible know about this crucial issue!!!

Media diversity is the cornerstone of democracy. But media ownership is more highly concentrated in Canada than almost anywhere else in the industrialized world. Almost all private Canadian television stations are owned by national media conglomerates and, because of increasing cross-ownership, most of the daily newspapers we read are owned by the same corporations that own television and radio stations.

This means a handful of Big Media Conglomerates control what Canadians can most readily see, hear and read. It means less local and regional content, more direct control over content by owners and less analysis of the events that shape our lives. It also means less media choice for Canadians and fewer jobs for Canadian media workers.

We must also be wary of the impacts mergers have on the diversity and neutrality of new on-line media. We need to reverse this trend before big media gets even bigger!

Tell the CRTC what you think: http://democraticmedia.ca/act

_DJ_

Anyone familiar with UofT’s flagship humanities and social sciences Robart’s library knows that it’s the target of a lot of well earned potshots. Here are a few of its better known claims to fame:

is it sinking?
‘Brutalist‘ architecture
it’s a peacock … !?

The ‘prison’ analogy is another fave, what with the books cloistered into a closed stack system far, far away from the scant selection of windows.

Since 2005 however, quietly in a room in the library at St. Michael’s college, UofT’s partnership with the Open Content Alliance has been digitizing public domain works (books and more) for the Internet Archive. Blackfly magazine published an article (which inspired the heading for this post) in which Carole Moore, head librarian at the St. George campus spoke to UofT’s foray into digitizing public domain works in its collection to make them more accessible and the library more democratic. Articles also appeared at the outset of the project in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

Owen Jarus at Blackfly spoke to how digitization can democratize and transform information through improved access, where WP and WSJ spoke to the business angle, mainly comparing the OCA’s initiative to the Google Books/copyright lawsuit situation. The subtext of course is ‘will we still need libraries’ if all the materials are online?

This week, I finished an intensive course on “Rethinking the Library” taught by guest instructor, Dr. Joseph Janes of the University of Washington’s iSchool. It gave a handful of lucky students the opportunity to have a forum to dialogue on where ‘the library’ is/can/should/isn’t going, and engage with the tough question of what was well coined by the University of Toronto Mississauga’s chief librarian, Mary Ann Mavrinac, as defining our ‘core’. While this question is an ongoing subtext to librarianship, having a sit down in a course environment was a great move. So kudos to the Faculty of Information studies at UofT for offering a full course on this important subject.

The content for me is still percolating … more discussion on this later. In the meantime, if you have burning thoughts on the matter, please chime in!

-PC-

Here’s a quick redirect to a Library Juice post with a couple of nice resources.

First is this guide for collecting from diverse sources (or: outsourcing, how not to).
Fostering Media Diversity in Libraries: Strategies and Actions.

Second there’s a link to a note on the ALA’s opposition to media concentration in the US since June 2003.

Relevant Canadian stuff from libraryland (found by searching the CLA website) is largely falling under the information literacy umbrella:

School Libraries in Canada link.
Information Literacy in Canada blog post.

-PC-

Well, I hate to add a post above PC’s great follow-up piece on FOSS, but anyone who wants to “talk turkey” in a post doesn’t get to stay at the top of the blog roll for long.

Some wonderful stuff is going down on the MediaReform website that was set up last month by a group of activists, academics, and random folks who are concerned about media in Canada. They’ve been getting a fair amount of help from the American group FreePress who have have been doing some really great work in the US on issues like media concentration, net neutrality, and supporting small & local media outlets. This could be the Canadian version — a bringing-together of some of the activists who work on those and similar issues in this country.

The main organizing tool so far, from what I can tell, is their online forum. People are posting all sorts of great content and trying to use the forum to spread the word about a variety of things that are going on right now (CRTC, independent media, ongoing meetings to try to start something, local initiatives, etc.) SO if you’re interested in such things, please have a wander over the site. Sign up, post, participate! There’s a lot of representation from Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, and it would be great to bring people from across the country into the discussions! If you do join, please introduce yourself and let everyone know where you’re from. And if you’re a librarian, let them know about that, too!

I hope you all get a chance to check it out and help build some momentum. As Robert McChesney (soon to be replacing Gandhi as the most quotable activist) says, “Regardless of what a progressive group’s first issue of importance is, its second issue should be media and communication, because so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not imposible, across the board.” Good stuff.

-SIO

PS - Not that any of you would be so rash as to be on Facebook or anything, but there’s MediaReform.ca group there, too, which acts primarily as a landmark to direct people to the forum’s website. It’s a great way to get other people involved, though…just invite them to join the group and hope they drift on over to the forum! Not that any of you are on Facebook, of course, knowing all about the privacy issues. Please note that I did not actually link to Facebook in this post. This is not an endorsement.

(Thanks to Kerry M. for the tip!)

- JH

The fabulous public broadcast station Television Ontario | TVO posts podcasts to, among other great shows, the lecture series Big Ideas. (And they’re available via RSS feed, MP3 file or iTunes).

Dr. Darin Barney, McGill professor of communication studies and Canada Research Chair in Technology and Citizenship, speaks via the UofT Hart House lecture series on (what else but) the relationship between technology and citizenship. He poses an argument for the politicization of technology.

Have a listen to Dr. Barney’s talk, entitled One Nation Under Google .
Read the 2007 Hart House Lecture blog by the same man here.

-PC-

Probably the first time I ever listened to radio on the internet it was on SomaFM’s drone stream. I remember thinking that this was something else and it was pretty exciting. Unfortunately, this excitement is likely to be contained, as has been previously posted on LA.

So today, I went to see how Soma was doing and I came across a blog written by Rusty Hodge. I strongly urge you to check it out and see what the fuss is about through the eyes of someone directly involved with this issue. There are tons of links, and tons of information here. Enjoy, and let’s stop this garbage.

http://somafm.com/blogs/rusty/2007/04/crisis-facing-internet-radio.html

_DJ_

May we turn from the usual U.S. bad guys (the Federal Communications Commission) and take a look at the Postal Regulatory Commission for a moment? They’re responsible for setting postage rates in the United States and they’re into some bad stuff. In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Katrina Vanden Heuvel says that the secrecy of the Postal Regulatory Commission “makes the FCC look like a Vermont commune.” The PRC actually accepted a rate plan from Time Warner (and rejected the one put forth by the U.S. Postal Service) which is going to favour large magazine publishers over small ones. Timeline information is available here.

Says FreePress:

Under the original plan, all publishers would have a mostly equal increase (approx. 12 percent) in the cost for mailing their publications. The Time Warner plan overturned this level playing field to favor large, ad-heavy magazines like People at the expense of smaller publications like In These Times and The American Spectator. It penalizes thousands of small- to medium-sized outlets with disproportionately higher rates while locking in privileges for bigger companies.

The Nation, for example, would be expected to pay $500 000 more per year in postage fees (according to itself). It all goes into effect July 15 unless, of course, we stop it from happening.

Please help tackle this ridiculousness on the FreePress site. Also, have a read through Robert McChesney’s letter to the masses.

If the plans go through, perhaps we Canadians should start looking for facilities to house all the American publishers moving to this side of the border.

Thanks to DD.

-SIO

Here at LA we’ve made the odd mention of the value of new and accessible audio materials, and how they support patrons needing alternatives to print materials. Shannon LaBelle, a MLIS student at SLAIS, UBC put together a fantastic presentation on the complete history of audio books in Canada.

Have a look …Audio books and access to information for Canadians with print disabilities.

I’d like an iPod in the fetching canary yellow depicted in “an example of an audiocassette player”.

-PC

Chip Ward’s illuminating article on how the library has become a de facto ’shelter’ in place of the state’s shrunken safety net was illuminating commentary on how marginalized ppl are often perceived as non-citizens, non-persons, non-existant nuisances in the collective conscience.

This seems like an opportune moment to give some props to some ‘information’ efforts that seek to give voiceless groups space to speak for themselves by putting the media in their own hands.

First is Homeless Nation a Canada wide non-profit organization that provides an online community and forum for homeless people to express their point of view, and an opportunity for the public to interact with and learn some things about being homeless in Canada. Launched in June of 2006, membership has grown to over 2000 participants.

Mentions of Homeless Nation in the media can be found here and here and in Rabble podcasts here.

Second is an archives that is documenting the history and cultural heritage of people who’ve been in contact with the psychiatric system.

Librarians, carve out a wee moment in your hectic schedules check out the Psychiatric Survivor Archives, Toronto. It’s a forum and space that aims to preserve the history of psychiatric survivors for current and future generations. PSAT seeks to create an opportunity to restore a sense of agency and personhood to psychiatric survivors, to value their lived experience, history and culture, and to engage a voiceless and stigmatized population in the democratic process of self expression.

Articles here and here published recently in the Toronto Star speak to MAD pride, a movement akin to the ‘queering’ of gay/lesbian culture.

- PC

With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks a few myths about the “developing” world. Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden’s world-renowned Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 20:35) - More TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com

(via Citadel of the Blogs)

- JH

Small press month! Better late than never, here’s the shout out to librarians, readers and aspiring authors.

The Small Press Centre in NYC quotes Alice Walker,
“as water to flowers, independent publishing to democracy.”

Check out the Small Press Month website for information on events and ideas for how to celebrate and support the importance of the small press in your community or library.

Parallel to the American event, the Toronto Small Press group is holding a fair in the T-Dot on Saturday March 26th.

And of course with cyberspace being the frontier for self-authorship and democracy, here’s a wee tip on a resource…

The Hesperian Foundation is a non-profit that provides resources to ‘help people take the lead’ in their own health care. Check it out to find ‘copyleft’ community health books for your downloading pleasure.