Blogging Librarians

African American Book Review Art African-American librarians are the gateway conservators of our history; their existence in the profession will play a vital role in the 21st century. I will never forget when I opened up Mildred Taylor’s, “Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry,” I was in the fifth grade. The writer took me into the world of a family who believed in love, perseverance, and faith. It was also the first time that I started to understand what race meant in the United States. An African...Read Full Story

Time out today for a reflection on the way that the internet brings people closer together. No, I'm not talking about FaceBook and Twitter party invitations, which in some cases seem to work amazingly well. On one of the first nice Friday afternoons this year, I was amazed to see hundreds of teenagers headed for Jeanne Mance Park in central Montreal, carrying things to eat and drink. It wasn't anything organized in advance, but the result of someone having the bright idea of suggesting a...Read Full Story

Liberal politicians, provincial or federal, never get my vote--I always go to left of them--and if they're not from a riding around me, I don't pay too much attention to individuals. So I didn't know very much about Claude Bechard, the young star of the Jean Charest Liberals who died on the weekend of pancreatic cancer. A great loss, those who knew him said. And certainly to be snuffed out by that particular form of the disease at 41 is a great sadness.Then among the appreciations of him and...Read Full Story

Alguns dizem que uma qualidade muito importante pelo escritor é de falar as pessoas de países e sociedades diferentes. O falecido José Saramago teve esta qualidade, com seu pensamento sobre as línguas desmonta."Hoje, uma língua que não se defende, morre," uma citação de Saramago, é gravada em um dos doze bancos decorados com azulejos criados por artistas plásticos de Montreal de origem portuguesa. Os banco são um passeio literário em rua Saint Laurent que corre no bairro português de Montreal...Read Full Story

...but then I didn't expect to do that on June 5, 2007 when started this blog. It was born in a conversation at The Writers' Union of Canada annual general meeting in Vancouver, where I found myself sitting next to Marc Côté of Cormorant Books. He had recently agreed to publish my novel The Violets of Usambara, and during a workshop on the internet and writers, we joked that maybe an African violet blog might be good promotion.Some 1260 posts and nearly 80,000 visitors later, I'm not sure...Read Full Story

A small victory: I just read a whole page of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro without having to look up one single word!The short novel by the 19th century Brazilian writer is required reading for my Portuguese class which is drawing to a close. It had been assigned before the strike of lecturers at the Université de Montréal, but did I get started reading it then? No! So here I am, sitting at the kitchen table for hours with two dictionaries, struggling with what is really a...Read Full Story

When asked how to improve the Google Librarian Newsletter, the cry was "Make it a blog!" or "Send more up-to-date information." Google has taken this feedback to heart, and starting on the 17th January, the Librarian Center made its home at http://librariancentral.blogspot.com, where you'll find the latest Google news, updates, and tips relevant to the librarian community. The blog includes links to the Newsletter Archive, the Your Stories page, and the Tools and Videos sections.Source...Read Full Story

Cara mengatasi domain berbayar blogspot bisa dibuka tanpa www (Solusi domain tanpa www ). Mungkin ada teman yang menggunakan domain berbayar di blogspot maka saat mengetikkan sebuah url tanpa www di browser maka secara default akan menampilkan error 404 Not Found ,  Terkadang juga akan diarahkan (redirect) ke opendns. Contoh 1 : url : http://komputerseo.com Contoh 2 : url : http://www.komputerseo.com Sedangkan jika mengetik url secara lengkap (dengan www) maka tampilannya akan terlihat...Read Full Story

Ms. Julie, the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s creation, has an amusing blog entry about The Walkable City this week. She is supposed to be a hip librarian who just loves Québooks, rating them with a kiss.She also loves shoes, and likes walkable cities because she can wear fancy ones “in the kind of dense cities Mary writes about like Toronto, Paris, New York and Singapore. The distances in walkable cities aren't all that great so you can indulge your passion for pretty shoes!”You'll have to...Read Full Story

Don't know if we'll have the equivalent of champagne to break over the bow of the book, but we've set Wednesday, Nov. 24 from 5:30 to 8 p.m. for the launch of Making Waves at Bobards, 4328 Boulevard St-Laurent. It's a lively bar/show space right across from the Parc du Portugal in the heart of the old Portuguese neighborhood of Montreal, and it frequently has Brazilian musicians--a very Luso-friendy place.More details soon.Photo: Left; Parc du Portugal when the roses were in bloomRight...Read Full Story