20 October 2019

Sunday Sundries

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

In Praise of a Nondescript Government Facility (or, The Most Canadian Title Ever)
A blog post by Alan MacEachern on Active History surprised me with the news that Matane’s Document Imaging Solutions Centre [DISC] is digitizing the Canadian Meteorological Service archive. The sentence "If you’ve used or perused the First World War attestation papers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force online, for example, you know their work." caused me to pause. The digitization of service files, completed last year, was performed in Gatineau whereas the earlier digitization of the two-page attestation papers could well have been work done in Matane.


Why It Is Time to Make Conferences Worth It
An opinion piece from The Scientist.
I love going to conferences, but the truth is that they are unreliable. In short (and in line with the title of a paper I recently published), they give us “what we want,” but not “what we need.” Overall, we have done very little to change the basic conference format for 50 years, and the findings of my research show fairly conclusively that in terms of fiscal and knowledge economies, and also in terms of the environmental impact caused by our conference travel, our current practices are unsustainable and need immediate development. 
Active History Election Posts
Some timely blog posts:
Of Energy and the Need for Electoral Reform: Déjà-vu and the 1979 and 1980 federal elections
Won Alexander Cumyow and the Fight for Democratic Rights
The Personality is Political

2 comments:

Sophronia said...

Is the "Matane" you mention on the South Shore of the St. Lawrence in Quebec? If so it brings back some fantastic memories. My husband, who was always a bit eccentric, took me to a place named La Belle Plage in Matane sur Mer for dinner. He had been there on a work assignment and discovered they caught fresh shrimp every day and smoked their own salmon. Dinner at La belle Plage may not seem eccentric to some people but it is if you knew that we lived in Mississauga, Ontario. Of course after an all day drive and a fabulous meal, we had to stay over. I can't imagine anyone in that village doing any digitizing!

K said...

Unreliable Conferences?? I would describe them as unaffordable Conferences. Yes there are a few like Lyn, and Smiths Falls who host all day Conferences for $20. But most other are in the hundreds of dollars - which means most of us can't attend.