DataLibre.ca’s List, brought to my attention by CAGlist:
Friday’s Census Media Round UP
July 16, 2010 by Tracey | No comments
- Toronto Star: Axing census questions adds up to trouble for Tories
“Truly a stupid decision,’’ Liberal critic says - The Province: Liberals want to recall committee to study census
- Liberals Art and Culture: Census 2011: Mauril Belanger Supports the Commissioner of Official Languages
- Canadian Institute of Planners: Letter
- Canadian Urban Institute: Proposed Changes on How Canada Collects Census Data Not in the Public Interest
- Lumina: 2011 Census (Reprise)
- The Contrarian: Harper’s Reformers vandalize the census
- The Kingston Whig Standard: Privacy watchdog satisfied with 2011 census
- Canadian Medical Association Journal: Ideology trumps evidence with new voluntary survey
- The Progressive Economics Forum: Canadian Labour Congress (CLC)
- The Calgary Herald: Census censure
- Canada.Com: Tony Clement willing to testify before MPs about census
- Canadian Marketing Association: CMA calls on government to retain mandatory detailed census form
- Radio Canada: Québec désapprouve à son tour
- Le Soleil: Recensement: non à l’abandon du questionnaire long
- Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: Blame Stats Canada!
- G&M Poll:
- Individual Action: do something really boring today
- National Post: National Post editorial board: Leave the long-form census alone
- Creative Class: by Richard Florida Politics vs. Data
- Canadian News Wire: La CREPUQ s’oppose fermement à la décision du gouvernement fédéral d’abolir l’obligation de remplir la version longue du questionnaire du recensement de 2011
- Gouvernment du Quebec: RECENSEMENT 2011: IMPACTS POUR LE QUÉBEC
- Ottawa Citizen Editorial Board: Admit the mistake
- The Progressive Economics Forum: Jewish, Evangelical groups oppose census change
- CTV news: Jewish, Evangelical groups oppose census change
Lists:
- CAPDU: List of media stories from CIQSS at l’Universite de Montreal
- Canada Social Data Strategy
- David Eaves: Save the Census Coalition
- Canadian Council on Social Development
- Previous Post (Cumulative List of Media)
Conservative Bloggers:
- Pragmatictory: Big Census
- Doubleblind: Long Form Census-changes
- Barrelstrength: The Long Form Census What Were They Thinking
Gutenberg 2.0 | Harvard Magazine May-Jun 2010.
Harvard’s libraries deal with disruptive change.
“Throw it in the charles,” one scientist recently suggested as a fitting end for Widener Library’s collection. The remark was outrageous—especially at an institution whose very name honors a gift of books—but it was pointed. Increasingly, in the scientific disciplines, information ranging from online journals to databases must be recent to be relevant, so Widener’s collection of books, its miles of stacks, can appear museum-like. Likewise, Google’s massive project to digitize all the books in the world will, by some accounts, cause research libraries to fade to irrelevance as mere warehouses for printed material. The skills that librarians have traditionally possessed seem devalued by the power of online search, and less sexy than a Google query launched from a mobile platform. “People want information ‘anytime, anyplace, anywhere,’” says Helen Shenton, the former head of collection care for the British Library who is now deputy director of the Harvard University Library. Users are changing—but so, too, are libraries. The future is clearly digital.
Isaac Kohane, director of the Countway Medical Library, sees librarians returning to a central role in medicine as curators of databases and as teachers of complex bioinformatics search techniques.
Yet if the format of the future is digital, the content remains data. And at its simplest, scholarship in any discipline is about gaining access to information and knowledge, says Peter Bol, Carswell professor of East Asian languages and civilizations. In fields such as botany or comparative zoology, researchers need historical examples of plant and animal life, so they build collections and cooperate with others who also have collections. “We can call that a museum of comparative zoology,” he says, “but it is a form of data collection.” If you study Chinese history, as Bol does, you need access to primary sources and to the record of scholarship on human history over time. You need books. But in physics or chemistry, where the research horizon is constantly advancing, much of the knowledge created in the past has very little relevance to current understanding. In that case, he says, “you want to be riding the crest of the tidal wave of information that is coming in right now. We all want access to information, and in some cases that will involve building collections; in others, it will mean renting access to information resources that will keep us current. In some cases, these services may be provided by a library, in others by a museum or even a website.”
Meanwhile, “Who has the most scientific knowledge of large-scale organization, collection, and access to information? Librarians,” says Bol. A librarian can take a book, put it somewhere, and then guarantee to find it again. “If you’ve got 16 million items,” he points out, “that’s a very big guarantee. We ought to be leveraging that expertise to deal with this new digital environment. That’s a vision of librarians as specialists in organizing and accessing and preserving information in multiple media forms, rather than as curators of collections of books, maps, or posters.”
Librarians as Information Brokers
Bol is particularly interested in the media form known as Google Book Search (GBS). The search-engine giant is systematically scanning books from libraries throughout the world in order to assemble an enormous, Internet-accessible digital library: at 12 million books, its collection is already three-quarters the size of Harvard’s. Soon it will be the largest library the world has ever known. Harvard has provided nearly a million public domain (pre-1923) books for the project; by participating, the University helped with the creation of a new tool (GBS) for locating books that is useful to people both at Harvard and around the world. And participation made the full text content of these books searchable and available to everyone in the United States for free.
GBS appeals to Bol and other scholars because it gives them quick and easy access to books that Harvard does not own (litigation over the non-public-domain works in GBS notwithstanding). For Bol, such a tool might be especially useful: Harvard acquires only 15,000 books from China each year, but he estimates that it ought to be collecting closer to 50,000. So GBS could be a boon to scholarship.
But GBS also raises all kinds of questions. If everything eventually is available at your fingertips, what will be the role of libraries and librarians?
Jonathan Shaw ’89 is managing editor of this magazine.
CBC News – Canada – Don’t cut long census form: Liberals.
The Liberals are demanding the federal government reverse its decision to scrap the mandatory long census form, saying they will introduce legislation to protect a mandatory long-form census if necessary.
The Conservative government announced last week that it is eliminating the mandatory long census form for the 2011 census, replacing it with a voluntary national household survey.
“There is no doubt the Tories hoped this decision would be ignored,” said Liberal MP Marlene Jennings at a news conference Wednesday. “It was taken in secret, with no consultation, and it was leaked on the eve of national holidays last week. They can’t get away with it that easy. We won’t let them get away with it that easy.”
All Canadians will still receive a mandatory short census. One in three households will be sent the new household survey as well. Previously, one in five households were sent the mandatory long-form census.
Senior statisticians at Statistics Canada have conceded the change will make it more difficult to obtain reliable, detailed information.
“The decision is dangerous and must be reversed,” said Jennings. By making the survey voluntary, its findings will likely be skewed and rendered irrelevant. Municipalities, provincial governments, community groups, business and other organizations that depend on the data for developing sound policy, will be negatively impacted.”
Jennings said that Industry Minister Tony Clement has not adequately explained the reasons for the decision and that if the concerns he has raised over intrusiveness and privacy are legitimate, he should hold public consultations on the issue first.
She said that if Clement does not reverse the decision, the Liberals would introduce a private member’s bill in the fall to amend the Statistics Act in a way that, if passed, would ensure the undertaking of a mandatory long-form census.
She argued that Clement has shown in postings to the social media site Twitter that he does not understand how the mandatory nature of the long-form census allows Statistics Canada to properly weight the short form data. Clement debated sample size and data weighting with other posters, including an economist.
“(That’s) something Mr. Clement seemed not to understand when he was tweeting yesterday, so maybe he should take a stats course,” she said.
In an email, Clement spokesperson Erik Waddell said that, “beyond the provision of basic information, the government does not believe it is appropriate to demand detailed information from its citizens.”
“We believe the new National Household Survey will enable us to obtain the quality data Canadians need, without mandating the provision of personal information by citizens.”
Waddell also said, “The government will not be revisiting this issue.”
On June 28, the following email was sent by the Chief Statistician of Canada, Munir A. Sheikh (Munir.Sheikh@a.statcan.gc.ca):
Subject: Update on the 2011 Census
This is an update on the 2011 Census. On June 26, 2010, the census questions were published in the Canada Gazette as required by the Statistics Act. The 2011 Census will consist of the same eight questions that appeared on the 2006 Census short-form questionnaire. All households will receive a short-form census questionnaire.
The information previously collected by the census mandatory long-form questionnaire will now be collected as part of the new voluntary National Household Survey (NHS). The NHS questionnaire will include questions on language, immigration, Aboriginal peoples, mobility, ethnicity, education, labour, income and housing.
The NHS will be conducted within four weeks of the May 2011 Census. Approximately, 4.5 million households will receive the NHS questionnaire, up from the 2.9 million households that would have received the census mandatory long-form questionnaire.
I know that I can count on your ongoing support to ensure the success of these two important Statistics Canada priorities.
This change means that the mandatory long form census questionnaire, sent to 20% of the Canadian population and consisting of detailed questions (see http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/ref/gazette-eng.cfm) will be replaced with a separate voluntary survey. It is unlikely that many Canadians will voluntarily provide all the rich and detailed information formerly gathered using the mandatory long form census. This means that the research community and all levels of government and community groups will no longer have access to this information which has been used to create public policy and conduct research that leads to an immeasurable number of programs and initiatives.
What Can You Do?
Learn more about the issue by reading the articles below. And, write your MP and Minister Tony Clement to express your concern. You can also sign the Keep the Canadian Census Long Form Petition and join the Keep the Canadian Census Long Form Facebook Page.
- Tories scrap mandatory long-form census – The Globe and Mail.
- Why you should care about the long census form’s demise – The Globe and Mail.
- Canadians must be able to count on Statistics Canada.
- A census we can count on – Winnipeg Free Press.
- Wrong move on census – thestar.com
- Former StatsCan head slams census decision by Tories – Winnipeg Free Press.
In recent weeks Knowledge Ontario (KO) was told it will receive no provincial funding this year for its digital services and products – their request for ongoing funding from the Ministry of Culture was not supported.
This decision deals a serious blow to cross-sector library collaboration in this province and creates challenges for libraries, librarians, library users and all taxpayers. Implications are:
• no KO licensed e-resources to K-12 schools, college, university and government libraries (current licenses expire Dec. 2010)
• no funds for the other four KO programs (Ask (askON), Connect, Learn and Our Ontario)
• an additional 22 public libraries, 2 university and 2 college libraries are unable to participate in and offer the askON/ONdemande service in September as planned
• an end to the askON internship program that provides virtual reference training and experience to dozens to iSchool students
• KO will need to secure “bridging” assistance to ensure that it has sufficient operating funds to continue from January to June 2011
There are some actions you can take if this news concerns you:
Write to the Minister of Education (responsible for school libraries), the Minister of Culture (responsible for public libraries), and/or the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities (reponsible for college/university libraries), or the Premier himself.
A link to a draft letter is available on Kim Stymest’s blog at http://kimstymest.com/2010/06/18/lets-get-agitated-part-2/
• Blog, twitter (#KOmatters) and work your networks. Let people know and encourage them to act.
• Join the Knowledge Ontario Matters Facebook group and watch for more calls to action
• Find out what your local library is doing about it. Have they passed a Board resolution supporting KO? Have they written their minister yet?
• Subscribe to KO News to make sure that you have all the current information. See www.knowledgeontario.ca/jointheflow.aspx
Library collaboration, of the kind introduced by Knowledge Ontario, makes not only good financial sense but offers all of Ontario’s libraries and librarians an opportunity to share, develop and use leading edge tools and services to better serve our profession, our clients and ourselves.




