We would like to take this opportunity to wish Paddy Burt, Library Director, warm wishes as she retires from Red River College and starts a new phase in her life. We thank you for all you have done to advocate for the Library and lead us in the right direction. You certainly will be missed.
Here are some photos of Paddy’s retirement party, held on Sept. 15, 2016:
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Check out our photo highlights of yesterday’s mini-golf tournament at Red River College Library, Notre Dame Campus. A big thank-you goes to Bettina Allen for planning the event and to all of the staff who volunteered. This was a lot of fun and we look forward to hosting mini-golf again.
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On June 1, the Red River College Library, Notre Dame Campus, held its first annual mini-golf tournament. A big thank-you goes to Bettina Allen, and all of the Library staff who volunteered to make this day a success. Lots of participants came into the Library to play, and a great time was had by all! We look forward to holding another mini-golf event soon.
The month of February is all about affairs of the heart. This Valentine’s Day, while you are taking time to remember your sweetheart, always remember February is the month where the Heart and Stroke campaign asks you to remember the perils of heart disease.
Heart disease and stroke take one life every 7 minutes, and 90% of Canadians have at least one risk factor. Heart Month is the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s key opportunity to reach millions of Canadians in February and alert them to the risks of heart disease and stroke. Volunteers are the face and the voice of the Heart and Stroke Foundation and Heart Month is a critical time when we depend on you to share our message.
In February, the “Heart and Stroke Foundation” began a national canvassing campaign. The success of this program depends on its 100,000 volunteers, who make friendly, personal requests to their neighbours and online networks. Volunteers canvass for donations through the month of February, to support life-saving research and raise awareness of heart disease and stroke within their communities.
Look for a “Heart” themed display in the showcase window just outside the Notre Dame Campus Library. As well you can check out some related items in our Library Collection. We have placed several of these items in our Notre Dame Campus window display.
“Poppies by Benoit Aubry of Ottawa” by Benoit Aubry (Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
Make remembrance more than something you feel. Make it something you do.
Each year, from November 5 to 11, Canadians join together to celebrate Veterans’ Week – this year is no different. During this week, hundreds of commemorative ceremonies and events will take place across the country to recognize the achievements of our Veterans and honour those who made the ultimate sacrifice.
This Veterans’ Week, take the remembrance challenge. There are many ways to show that you remember and honour our Veterans. Visit the Veteran’s Week Web site for more information.
As well you can check out some related items in our Library Collection. We have placed several of these items in our Notre Dame Campus window display. Have a look when you come by, or check out the list of items here: http://library.rrc.ca/Search/Window-Display.aspx
In Flanders Fields : the story of the poem by John McCrae
Included in our window display is “In Flanders Fields : the story of the poem by John McCrae”. In May 2015 the poem “In Flanders Fields,” will mark 100 years since it was written. This special edition book serves to celebrate that anniversary.
Over the years, John McCrae’s poem has been recited by many generations who continue to cherish the underlying message of respect for the fallen and a longing for peace.
In this book, the lines of the celebrated poem are interwoven with fascinating information about the First World War (1914-1918) and details of daily life in the trenches in Europe. Also included are accounts of McCrae’s experience in his field hospital and the circumstances that led to the writing of “In Flanders Fields.” (Goodreads.com)
Lest we forget.
Check out the window display at the Notre Dame Campus Library.
Ally Week is a national youth-led effort empowering students to be allies against anti-LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) bullying, harassment and name-calling.
It is usually held in September or October, often coinciding with National Coming Out Day on October 11, and October also being LGBT History Month. The event started in October 2005 and has grown since. This year Ally Week takes place October 12-16, 2015.
The goal of Ally Week is to diminish stereotypes and exclusion while highlighting that peer support for LGBT students is stronger than the students themselves may have thought existed. People across the country can engage in a national dialogue about how everyone in and out of school can work to become better allies to LGBT youth.
To increase LGBTT* awareness Library Services set up a window display at Notre Dame Campus where you can find additional information about the LGBTT* initiative at RRC. As well, the RRC Library has many LGBTT* themed items in its collection. Check out some of the items that are currently on display in the Notre Dame Campus window display.
List of Items: http://library.rrc.ca/Search/Window-Display.aspx
Please note: In this year’s art contest, unfortunately no entry met the criteria listed. As a result, we have not awarded a prize. We hope for a better outcome next time! (Updated 7 Dec 2015)
October is Canadian Library Month. Show off your artistic talent by creating a Library poster or bookmark!
The poster or bookmark should represent one of our many services such as the Library databases, reference help, etc. (See the guidelines below for complete details). Need ideas? Unsure what we have? Ask our staff! They would be happy to show you anything from how to log into databases to requesting books from Exchange District or Notre Dame Libraries.
Please make your entry colourful, creative, and be sure to include one of our organizational logos: (Library Wordmark Image | Red River College Logo Image) If you can free hand the logo with colored pencils have fun, or dust off Photoshop/Publisher for those with digital wizardry. If going the digital route, make sure anything used conforms with copyright restrictions. In other words, images must either be original or in the public domain.
Keep in mind the winner(s) may find their creation is actually used by the Library for promotional purposes!
Open to all students
The Library will once again be participating in the Sustainable Living EcoFair.
We are hosting a Book Exchange – bring in your gently used books and exchange them for others that are new-to-you. Or donate them to the Library’s ongoing Recreational Reading Book Exchange – we are always looking for new titles!
Everyone who participates in the exchange may enter a draw for an eco-prize.
And, get rid of your clean plastic bags at the same time! Swap a dozen or more for a re-usable Library bag.
The event will be held on:
For your convenience, books may be dropped off in the Library before the event.
Poetry reaffirms our common humanity by revealing to us that individuals, everywhere in the world, share the same questions and feelings. – United Nations World Poetry Day Page
In celebration of World Poetry Day (March 21), I decided to take the chance to feature some of the items that can be found in the RRC Libraries digital collection. If you need instruction on how to use our EBSCOhost e-book collection check out this blog post we did explaining how to use the E-Book collection.
I like poetry, but I tend to have a hard time pinning down the titles and collections I want to read when in a book store. E-Books offer the perfect ability to browse and find something you like out of a superior selection to what you will find on (or what would fit on) a shelf. From a quick online browse of the collection, I pulled a list of about 30 titles I liked. All were worth featuring on this blog post. I couldn’t manage to par it down to less than 11 titles even though I was only planning to feature 10.
A quick search of the E-Book collection under the subject ‘poetry’ gave 6,907 titles for me to browse through. There is a lot discover, all of which is available free to students as part of the RRC online collection.
With the rise in popularity of formats like graphic novels you see a current demand for shorter reads. Poetry browsing and reading makes for a quick study break for students, so take a shot at browsing our E-Books collection to find what you like.
To get you started, take a look at the following list of titles that cover quite a range of interests, you’ll find Love Poems for Supervillains, anti-hero busboys, post-apocalyptic worlds, compelling descriptions of nature, the complexity of human relationships, and the outcomes of human actions explored in these collections of poems. Happy World Poetry Day!
Doom : Love Poems for Supervillains
Love Poems for Supervillains is an edgy and erotic investigation of comic book bad boys. These poems employ a language that is highly technical and dense, but it becomes witty, intimate and even tender in its specificity. These poems address the results of abuses of power and taken together present a case study in the pathology of villainy… – Google Books
In American Busboy, a wry anti-mythology, the anti-hero busboy in an anonymous Clam Shack! tangles with the monotonous delirium of work, the indignities and poor pay of unskilled labor, the capricious deus ex machina of mean-spirited middle management, the zombified consumption of summer tourists, while jostling for the goddess-like attentions of waitresses and hostesses—all battered up in sizzlingly crisp wit and language, and deep-fried in a shiny glaze of surrealism. —Lee Ann Roripaugh –Google Books
Creamsicle Stick Shivs : Poems
John Stiles’ first collection of poetry, Scouts Are Cancelled, explored the dialect and the dilemmas of down-home life in Nova Scotia’s rural Annapolis Valley. In his second collection, the poet expands his horizons. Chronicling his movements from Canada’s east coast to Toronto’s self-obsessed urban core, following his heart around the world to find love and employment in England, these poems resonate with profound ideas and offbeat observations on people and place, on the variables that combine to create a person’s identity, and what it means to leave, to seek, and to desire a home.Alive with Stiles’ distinct linguistic charms and poetic good nature, Creamsicle Stick Shivs is a book of subtle inventiveness and undeniable roguish delight. – Google Books
In accessible poems full of rich detail and painterly images, Maura Stanton looks under the surface of the ordinary, hoping to find the magic spark below the visible. In poems both humorous and elegaic, she gathers strange facts, odd events, and overlooked stories to construct her own vision of immortality, one made up of fragments of history and geography and the illusions of yearning human beings. From elephants in Ceylon to Nazi prisoners in Ireland, from Beowulf to Jane Austen, from sonnets to prose poems to blank verse, Immortal Sofa conjures our complex existence in all its sorrowful but astonishing variety. – Google Books
Spare yet evocative, the poems in Mister Martini pair explorations of a father-son relationship with haiku-like martini recipes. The martini becomes a daring metaphor for this relationship as it moves from the son’s childhood to the father’s death. Each poem is a strong drink in its own right, and together they form a potent narrative of alienation and love between a father and son struggling to communicate. – Google books
In Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, Jeff Latosik considers states of durability and longevity in an age of ephemeral mores and instant gratification. Probing the pressure points where notions of physical, psychological, and technological strength continually threaten to erupt into their opposites, these poems ask which aspects of our daily lives might actually last beyond the here and now, beyond their own inherent limitations of time, person, and place. –Insomniac Press Publisher
Wry, spry, entrancing and intelligent, the poems of Little Black Daydream invite us into a richly imagined future: not just post-apocalyptic, but post-everything. What a haunting, dark, and oddly comic world, where inhabitants “fashion hobo bags out of surplus Che Guevara tee-shirts / and fill them with the molars of the dead,” and where “the Secretary of Consolidated Debt tells his sons each morning: / when I was your age, no independent clause.” We wake from our Little Black Daydream bolstered by our imaginative sojourn in this precisely rendered world. This book is a major accomplishment.
–Beth Ann Fennelly, Unmentionables
In this debut collection, Voodoo Inverso, Mark Wagenaar composes a startling mystical imagism and sets it to music, using self-portraits to explore differing physical and spiritual landscapes. He uses a variety of personae—a victim of sex trafficking in Amsterdam, a fichera dancer, a portrait haunted by Dante, a carillonneur of starlight, an elephant in pink slippers remembering its beloved—to silhouette the intricacies and frailties of the body and the world. In a series of “gospels” and “histories”—such as the poems “History of Ecstasy” and “Moth Hour Gospel”—he shines a light on the possibilities of transcendence and transfiguration, weaving together memory and loss with desire and hope. – Google Books
… Currin’s poems present thought as a bright, emotionally complex event, a place where mind and sense and the natural world they move through become indistinguishable elements in a mysterious, familiar, vexing, fascinating, and continuous human drama. There are no saints in this hagiography only ghosts, sisters, spiders, birds This is an anti-biography. It starts with death and ends with birth. In between: life after life. – Google Books
Li’l Bastard : 128 Chubby Sonnets
…Li’l Bastard is a collection of ‘chubby sonnets’ – sixteen-line poems organized in eight twenty-poem sequences – that explore the poet’s obsessions and engagements with America and Canada, popular culture, love and death, aging, baseball and beer and Barnaby Jones. Adopting a wild array of tone and artistic strategies, from picaresque to fantasy, to observational humour and the simple song lyric, these poems map the poet’s midlife crisis on a wild flight that touches down in Montreal, Chicago, Nashville, Texas and Los Angeles. Poignant and often achingly funny, Li’l Bastard will no doubt cement McGimpsey’s status as a beloved and ever-surprising original. This work was a Finalist for the 2012 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. – Google Books
In this much-anticipated new collection, poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the “Utne Reader” has noted, what makes this work ‘so compelling is Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.’ “The Porcupinity of the Stars” sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder, and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness. His Heisenbergian sensibility honed to a fine edge, the poems in this bright, bold and intensely visual book add a surreptitious intensity and wry maturity to Barwin’s trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion, and invention.”
Freedom to Read Week is an annual event organized by the Freedom of Expression Committee of the Book and Periodical Council. It encourages Canadians to think about and reaffirm their commitment to intellectual freedom, which is guaranteed them under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Freedom to read can never be taken for granted. Even in Canada, a free country by world standards, books and magazines are banned at the border. Books are removed from the shelves in Canadian libraries, schools and bookstores every day. Free speech on the Internet is under attack. Few of these stories make headlines, but they affect the right of Canadians to decide for themselves what they choose to read.
This selective list, prepared by the Freedom of Expression Committee of the Book and Periodical Council, provides information on more than 100 books, magazines, graphic novels and other written works that have been challenged in the past decades. Each challenge sought to limit public access to the work in schools, libraries, or bookstores. Some challenges were upheld; others were rejected. Some challenges remain unresolved.
Read more: http://www.freedomtoread.ca/censorship-in-canada/challenged-works-list/
The Canadian Library Association’s Advisory Committee on Intellectual Freedom, in partnership with the Book and Periodical Council’s Freedom of Expression Committee, developed an annual survey to investigate challenges to books, magazines and DVDs in Canadian public libraries. The results of the most recent surveys are posted here.
RRC Polytech campuses are located on the lands of Anishinaabe, Ininiwak, Anishininew, Dakota, and Dené, and the National Homeland of the Red River Métis.
We recognize and honour Treaty 3 Territory Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, the source of Winnipeg’s clean drinking water. In addition, we acknowledge Treaty Territories which provide us with access to electricity we use in both our personal and professional lives.
