CBC

Remember my travails with trying to borrow and then return a digital audiobook about learning Norwegian? Well in late February I recorded a short interview with CBC’s Nora Young about my experience, and CBC Spark has incorporated this into the introduction to a panel discussion about ebooks and libraries that’s a compelling listen:

My favourite quote from my chat with Nora, if I don’t say so myself, is “I don’t know what the answer is, but I gotta imagine that there’s a better way to deal with all this than prohibiting people on PEI from learning Norwegian for 21 days.” The panel that follows has thought much more deeply about these issues than I; it was good to heard the broader context.

Catherine spoke to CBC’s Karen Mair about her show in the Confederation Centre Art Gallery; listen:

(Embedded audio widget courtesy of A Better Embedder, which is really quite wonderful).

So remember that tweet from the Public Library Service here in Prince Edward Island? The one that ended up with me depriving the citizens of PEI of the resources needed to learn Norwegian?

Well, Dan Misener, personable producer of CBC Radio One’s Spark, read the post about my travails and invited me into the studio this morning to talk with host Nora Young about the crazy system we have for library lending of digital things that’s mirrored on the sensible system for library lending physical things.

Listen for it as the “compelling personal anecdote” behind broader Spark discussion of this issue on an upcoming episode.

Former Director of Computer Services at the University of PEI, Jim Hancock, appeared on Island Morning today to talk about the 25th anniversary of the upei.ca domain.

While going through a bag of old VHS video tapes yesterday I came across this recording of Matthew Rainnie reporting for CBC Compass on the then-new website for The Buzz newspaper that I launched as a side-project with Buzz owner Peter Richards and ISN owner Kevin O’Brien. Even though it’s only 17 years ago, the language — “information superhighway” comes up several times — and the technology — it looks like very-early Netscape running on Peter’s Mac — makes it seem like we’re talking about the advent of the telegraph. 

I digitized the video in the Collaboratory at Robertson Library at the University of PEI, which has excellent (and free) facilities for converted VHS videotapes, audio cassettes and vinyl records to digital files.