Toronto Metropolitan University Libraries » News » 2015 » February

One Week in the DME!

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Sara

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.

Wide shot of the DME during opening week

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!

Celebrate Fair Dealing Week!

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Sara

Why are we celebrating this week – especially in Canada?

Fair dealing defines important users rights allowed by Canadian laws. These user rights give Canadian citizens the ability to use fair dealing as an exception to the exclusive rights of copyright holders to control the copying and distributing of their content. This exclusive right means that, other than an insubstantial amount of a work, the work can’t be copied without the permission of the copyright holder. User’s rights in the form of fair dealing mean that some copying is allowed without permission – for certain purposes and for short amounts of a work. Luckily for students and educators some of the copying of works that we do in our learning and teaching are covered by fair dealing. For example fair dealing purposes include private study, research, criticism, review and education. Much of what students and educators do on a daily basis would be really really hard without this user’s right. Student and faculty ability to do effective research, use content in criticism and papers, teach and share information would be seriously inhibited if most uses had to always have permission be granted when someone was only copying a short excerpt. Fair dealing is really important because it allows a freer flow of information to happen in an educational setting – it promotes learning and scholarship. So celebrate Fair Dealing – it is a user’s right that Canadians should use, not lose.

Whither the Canadian dollar … and the library budget

Posted on February 13, 2015 by Jane

As we dove into budget preparations for the next fiscal year, we were confronted with an unforeseen challenge: the dollar totally tanked. That had a lot of us doing this:

The library gets a share of the university budget for base operations. In 2012/2013 (most recent CAUBO data available), this was 3% of the total university budget. Approximately 35% of that operations budget (roughly $4 million) is dedicated to growing our library collection. Since 2009/2010, like all other departments, we have also had to factor in the necessary budget reductions in our annual budget plans, averaging 2%-3% base reductions each year.

Regularly, we struggle with making sure ends meet as we see annual inflationary increases from the publishers to whom we are beholden to provide access to the top tier journals in academia. In 2015, that increase was projected to be 6.1%. In years past, particularly in 2011 and 2012, when the dollar was hovering toward par, we enjoyed increased purchasing power. Despite our piece of the pie shrinking, we managed to keep pace without too much effect on the community (i.e. cancellation of resources, as has been the case elsewhere in the province) through strategic purchasing and use of one-time-only money.

And then … the economy threw us for a loop. Despite our best efforts at planning for a worst case scenario, we didn’t quite expect this. In recent months the Canadian dollar tumbled to a low point of .73 (January 30, 2015). The effect on the library’s collection budget is substantial. The majority (approximately 70-75%) of our electronic resources and our monographs are invoiced in US dollars. The price tag for an already expensive journal just got way more expensive.

We still don’t know what the long term effect of this will be on the library’s bottom line. We were lucky to have paid many of our invoices earlier in this fiscal year when the exchange rate was more favorable. But if we now have $500,000 USD worth of of outstanding invoices at this point in the fiscal calendar, we’ll end up paying over $620,000 CAD!

For now, we are watching and waiting …

Further reading on bundled packages from the major publishers:

The Big Deal: Not Price But a Cost

Library Spend on Journal Big Deals (UK)

Valentine’s Day… by the numbers

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Sara

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.

For more information about data and statistics resources available at the Library, contact librdata@torontomu.ca or visit the Library’s data pages.