At the recent Conference of the Canadian Library Association, I had the opportunity to give a presentation on the research I’m conducting on the use of social discovery tools in public libraries, together with my research partner Laurel Tarulli (Collections Access Librarian, Halifax Public Libraries). Laurie and I co-presented with professional colleagues from the Edmonton Public Library (EPL). Laurie and I are currently examining log analysis of the social discovery tools AquaBrowser (Halifax) and BiblioCommons (EPL). I’m including the slides of our presentation and would welcome your feedback. I think that social discovery tools present many exciting opportunities for libraries to connect with their clients via the catalogue and to enrich catalogue records via user-contributed metadata.

On Sunday, January 24, 2010, I participated in a stimulating panel discussion on “From Digital Third World to Digital Citizenship: the state of the internet and how Canada measures up“. The panel was organized by Dan Robichaud from the Halifax Regional CAP Association and it was part of Podcamp Halifax 2010

There is really no debate that Internet access is an important part of modern life. We use the Internet to access government information, look for a job, learn, read news, write blogs, keep in touch with relatives, make purchases, and so on. But unfortunately, access to the Internet is not yet universal. Even in a country as developed as Canada, we are still debating on (1) how to connect as many people as possible to the Internet and (2) whether or not a government should guarantee a minimal Internet connection to its citizens. To address these issues, some European countries, such as Estonia, Finland and France have declared the Internet a human right. The question is should Canada follow these European countries and also legally declare that Internet access is a human right?

You can find my thoughts on this issue at http://anatoliygruzd.com/home/?p=87

~Anatoliy Gruzd