I spend a lot of my time reading books but also watching movies and, more often, watching other people play video games. Why? Because I’m a voracious collector of stories—different stories in different formats, but stories nonetheless. But does the fact that I read and watch stories a lot mean also that I own these…

Game-based learning has been around since the beginning of time … don’t you think? As kids, we learn by playing and as adults we can find ourselves engaged in team building exercises that involve a game of some sort, even if it’s a simple as a “meet and greet,” where we have a short conversation…

As a teacher librarian in a busy K-to-8 school it would be easy to get lost in the day to day operations of my own space and forget about the power of connecting with other school library professionals. I am very lucky to have a well-developed network of support with other teacher librarians within our…

The Safe spaces column is an attempt to explore today’s persistent socio-cultural debates in light of the alleged values of the librarian profession: intellectual freedom, equity, inclusiveness, diversity, evidence. The first topic Safe spaces attempts to parse is the current debate over cultural appropriation. The controversy of Write magazine In early 2017, Hal Niedzviecki wrote a…

Welcome to The Library IT Crowd, a column brought to you by the Ontario Library and Information Technology Association (OLITA). We showcase some of the great librarians and library professionals currently working with technology, get to know them, and share their experiences. We hope we can inspire you, and shed some light onto what goes…

If you work in a public library, chances are you’ve been asked to write an annotation. While it seems relatively simple—write a few words to promote an item in your collection—getting down your key thoughts can often be difficult. Writers will say it’s harder to write something short than it is to write something long,…