1. My classmates and I had roughly a month to put together an online system for aboriginal archival photos. The “beta” site is available @ student2.fis1311.ischool.utoronto.ca. It’s linked up to Flickr so that users can help ID persons and places etc. but Archon is in place to allow an archivist or staff member of an aboriginal organization to filter through redundancies, spelling errors and the dross that can make user generated content problematic for information search.

Archon is open source, and it’s pretty easy to use once it’s been installed. It works very well with photos, although I had other classmates who experienced difficulty with trying to upload audio content. I’ve been discussing this system with the head librarian at the special Spadina branch at the TPL, and we’ll see if any northern aboriginal organizations I get in touch with might find this a useful solution. Go F/OSS!

2. Have been slowly working towards a fundraiser for the SHSS library w/the Child & Youth Advocacy group at my faculty. The first thing I want to buy the students is the Twilight series! And Halo books. On a side note, I finally learned how to play Halo and have no idea what kind of appeal a Halo BOOK would have, but it was honestly the only thing I could convince the younger male students @ SHSS to read.

3. I’m working on a paper that I hope to eventually submit to our faculty’s open source journal. For some reason, my profs have always assumed that I was going to pursue the academic track, speaking as if academia was some kind of inevitability to me, as natural as aging. But despite my theoretical bent, my goals have always been advocacy, community outreach, etc. Working with organizations like TakingITGlobal, the Inuvik Youth Centre, etc. Theory has really informed that type of practical work for me. Obviously not directly, but certainly from an ideological/philosophical perspective, the influence of which is very profound.