The Library’s Digital Media Experience Lab (the DME) opened on Monday and it’s been full of students ever since.

The DME is a library resource that aims to support student learning both within the classroom and as an extracurricular pursuit through workshops, peer tutoring, and one-on-one instruction. The goal of the DME is to help Ryerson students learn basic and advanced technology skill-sets while exposing them to new and emerging tech.

To introduce students to the DME, the team set up a “tech petting zoo” for the first-week kickoff. A Makey-Makey fruit piano and playable birds, a 3D printer in the midst of being built, and an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset drew crowds into the lab’s beautiful space on the 3rd floor of the Student Learning Centre.

Several students have already become DME regulars, lending their enthusiasm and expertise to help build the 3D printer, create new configurations for the Makey-Makeys, and set up new virtual reality experiences by connecting the Oculus Rift to a Leap Motion controller. On Thursday, the students taught Ryerson Chief Librarian Madeleine Lefebvre how to play chess using the system.

As more equipment continues to arrive, we fully expect that the space will continue to evolve to meet the needs of our creative, experimental, dedicated students!

Did you know that 8.3 million roses were grown for sale in Canada in 2013 – and 11 million dozen more roses (that’s 1,320,000,000!) were imported? Check out Statistics Canada’s Valentine’s Day in Canada for more information about this most romantic of holidays… by the numbers.

Ryerson Library is pleased to provide subject-specific research help and resources for topics and subjects in indigenous research. With support from the Aboriginal Education Council, the Library has developed a research portal that will assist students and faculty researching Aboriginal social work, health and well-being, politics and status, and traditional knowledge and education. Check out the portal here.

For more information about the portal or Aboriginal research at Toronto Metropolitan University, please contact Kelly Dermody (kdermody@torontomu.ca).

Ryerson Library is thrilled to congratulate four of our staff members who have received 2015 staff and faculty awards from the university. Steven Marsden, Kelly Dermody, Dana Thomas, and Weina Wang have been recognized for a wide variety of achievements, including enhancing accessibility to library content, teaching excellence, new assessment measures, exploring emerging technologies, and many more. Congratulations Steven, Kelly, Dana, and Weina!

From Ryerson’s Recognition & Awards page:

Steven Marsden – Make Your Mark Award

Steven Marsden, Library Systems Analyst, deserves recognition for his outstanding achievement in enhancing library service and fostering a culture of innovation. He was the lead developer of a number of ground breaking apps: Book Finder, an award winning interactive app that helps users retrieve books with ease; RULA Maps, a mobile/web app using geo-location and augmented reality technologies. The latter has been adopted by academic departments, manifesting the interdisciplinary collaboration at Ryerson. Steven is further developing the popular Student Online Room Booking application to extend to the Student Learning Centre. Steven customized an E-Reserve system for Ryerson’s “One Stop Course Readings” copyright management, including an impressive data-driven problem-solving solution to overcome the challenge of real-time statistics. He implemented the Papyrus system to manage accessible readings for students with print disabilities, making the University one step closer to full accessibility.

Kelly Dermody, Dana Thomas, and Weina Wang – Librarians’ Service Awards

Kelly Dermody has been the E-Learning Librarian since 2013. Prior to this she was the Accessibility Services Librarian. In her capacity as E-Learning Librarian, Kelly collaborated with Student Learning Support and drew upon work done at York University to develop the RUSearch Tutorial that is a step by step guide to developing, organizing, researching and writing an essay. Kelly was instrumental in developing five online tutorials on library research for use with the SSH205 students who are learning in a flipped-classroom approach initiated in fall 2014. Faculty feedback echoes that of lead instructor Paul Chafe: “This flipped approach really works, and I can tell you my students really benefited from the tutorials and the one-on-one time during the visit to the library”. Kelly continues to share her knowledge and enthusiasm with colleagues through presentations to staff, at conferences and in publications.

Dana Thomas is the Evaluation and Assessment Librarian and has been instrumental in conducting numerous surveys with the Ryerson community including Summon satisfaction, Ithaka S&R, and LibQual+. All of these surveys provide the Library with the data results that help to inform its strategic directions and operational objectives. She has demonstrated collegiality by providing covers for research and maternity leaves for other Librarians including the responsibility for Electronic Resources and other subject areas. Additionally, Dana hosted the successful and well-attended Canadian Library Assessment Conference here at Ryerson, an event that has continued to generate discussion for assessment best practices at Canadian academic libraries. In 2014 she had a prize-winning poster at an international conference that gave Ryerson broad recognition for its work in library assessment. Dana clearly demonstrates that she sets an example for achievement and success in academic librarianship.

Weina Wang brings strong leadership, customer service and a fresh air in organizational culture to the Ryerson community through her career as a professional librarian. As a leader and technology advocate, she was involved in many library-wide strategic planning initiatives and led staff through a series of changes in the organizational reshape process. She has helped set a new direction for the department based on emerging access service trends, and her proposal of a hybrid EM/RFID gate solution would allow the library to be operational ready for the new Student Learning Centre and any future RFID technological development. Most recently, her effort in the ever-popular laptop loan program and her enthusiasm for mobile learning initiatives have helped enhance the library’s reputation tremendously. Weina is a librarian, a business strategist and innovative technologist that helps build the Ryerson library to be a library of the future.

Simply Map now offers enhanced Canadian census data!

“Due to changes in methodology, Statistics Canada is not officially releasing dissemination area (DA) data from the 2011 NHS [National Household Survey], which replaced the long-form census. CensusPlus offers enhanced data for the most important NHS themes for all DAs in Canada, fills in missing values and eliminates random rounding in both NHS and Census data. The result is a comprehensive set of demographic variables available for any geographic level — be it standard census and postal geographies or custom client trade areas.” (Environics Analytics, 2014) Read more…

Access Simply Map Canada

RULA sends warmest congratulations to Ryerson President Sheldon Levy, who was honoured on Monday with the Egerton Ryerson Award for Dedication to Public Education. From People for Education:

The Egerton Ryerson Award is presented annually to a person or persons who have been both active and public in their advocacy for strong public education. The award recognizes the deep value of learning – from the early years until graduation from high school, and those who have made the connection between strong public education, social cohesion, and strong and engaged societies.

While attending the gala, RULA’s Chief Librarian Madeleine Lefebvre had the chance to talk to the Honourable Bill Davis, former Premier of Ontario (see photo, right). Mr Davis was on hand as a member of the awards committee to pay tribute to President Levy and chatted with Madeleine about the Library and the soon-to-be opened Student Learning Centre.

President Levy has been a tireless supporter of the library throughout his tenure as Toronto Metropolitan University’s President. Our heartfelt congratulations on your recognition!

The Library is pleased to report the addition of more than two hundred monographs and pamphlets by way of a private donation. This donation brings the Library’s holdings to over 3,700 books, pamphlets, DVDs and video recordings relating to the Caribbean.

The donation includes an impressive variety of titles including a literary criticism on the poetry of Aimé Césaire, a discourse on Rastafarian music in contemporary Jamaica, and an economic history of Puerto Rico. The oldest item is Edgar Mayhew Bacon and Eugene Murray Aaron’s 1890 treatise The New Jamaica: Describing the Island, Explaining its Conditions of Life and Growth and Discussing Its Mercantile Relations and Potential Importance.  Several works date from the early 21st century including Talk Stories by Jamaica Kincaid and Jennie Marcelle Smith’s When the Hands are Many: Community Organization and Social Change in Rural Haiti. Historians, literary scholars, sociologists, and multi-disciplinary scholars interested in migration studies or postcolonial issues will all find something of interest in this new acquisition.

For additional tips on finding Caribbean Studies resources at RULA, check out the guide for CHST222: History of the Caribbean and the general Caribbean Studies Guide. For more information about the donation, or to learn more about the Library’s Caribbean Studies collection, contact the subject liaison for Caribbean Studies, Val Lem.

The Department of Geography and Environmental Studies and
the Library’s Geospatial Map and Data Centre present

GIS Day at Ryerson

19 November 2014, 1pm-5pm, LIB489

We welcome Ryerson students, faculty, and staff, and the local community to a celebration of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) research and applications on this year’s global GIS Day.
The event takes place on the 4^th floor of the Toronto Metropolitan University Library & Archives, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto.

Keynote presentations (approx. half an hour each):

1:30pm            Gillian Woolmer – Assistant Director, Wildlife Conservation Society Canada

2:30pm            Harvey Low – Manager, Social Policy Analysis & Research, City of Toronto

3:30pm            Tony Lea – Senior Vice President and Chief Methodologist, Environics Analytics

Research & project exhibits:

Live demos

– Scholar’s GeoPortal and SimplyMap (Dan Jakubek and Noel Damba, Ryerson Library/GMDC)

– QGIS, OpenStreetMap, and “Geo for All” (Claus Rinner and Eric Vaz, Ryerson/Geography)

– The Neptis Geoweb – Engagement by Visualization (Vishan Guyadeen, Neptis Foundation)

– Thought Spot – A Crowdsourced Map of Health and Wellness Services for Students (Heather Hart, Ryerson/Geography & Centre for Addiction and Mental Health)

Posters

A selection of recent conference posters by Ryerson faculty and students:

– GIS application examples in the Toronto area

– Geography Awareness Week and the BA in Geographic Analysis

Student course work exhibits:

Slideshows

– Draft project presentations from SA8904, GIS Project Management, Master of Spatial Analysis

– Draft map posters from SA8905, Thematic Cartography and Geovisualization, Master of Spatial Analysis

A light snack will be available starting at 2pm.