Federal Election 2011: Recommended Reading

Curious about the upcoming election? Looking for background information to better understand what’s going on? Confused about the Canadian political process? Here are some books, journals and websites that can help.

Books

These books are also on display in the library.

• How Canadians Govern Themselves. By Eugene A. Forsey. 2010.
  Call number: JL65/F67/2010
  An easy to understand introduction to our system of government.
  Also available online.
• How Parliament Works. By John Bejermi. 2000.
  Call number: Ref JL136/B48/2000
• Canada’s Electoral Process: Frequently Asked Questions. Parliamentary Information and Research Service, 2007.
  Call number:
  Pamphlet files PRB 05-46E.
  Also available online.
• A History of the Vote in Canada. Elections Canada. 2007.
  Call number: JL193/H57/2007.
• The Language of Canadian Politics: A Guide to Important Terms and Concepts. By John McMenemy. 1995.
  Call number: Ref JA61/M33/1995.
• The Origins of Canadian and American Political Differences. By Jason Kaufman. 2009.
  Call number: E183.8/C2/K38/2009.
  Examines why the political systems of Canada and the United States are so different.
• Fixing Canadian Democracy. Edited by Gordon Gibson. 2003.
  Call number: JL167/F59/2003.
  Ideas from a Fraser Institute conference on reforming our political process.
• The Trouble with Canada… Still! A Citizen Speaks Out. By William D. Gairdner. 2010.
  Call number: HN103.5/G35/2010
• Value Change and Governance in Canada. Edited by Neil Nevitte. 2002.
  Call number: JL186.5/V34/2002
• Citizens. By Elisabeth Gidengil. 2004.
  Call number: JL187/C58/2004
  Examines Canadian citizens and their knowledge of and participation in politics.
• Political Parties. By William Cross. 2004.
  Call number: JL195/C76/2004.
  Looks at different aspects of Canadian political parties, from their functioning as membership organizations to how they select candidates and leaders, to how they conduct election campaigns.
• In Search of Canadian Political Culture. By Nelson Wiseman. 2007.
  Call number: JL65/W57/2007.
  Looks at the political of Canada and its regions/provinces.
• Speaking Out: Ideas that Work for Canadians. By Jack Layton. 2004.
  Call number: FC635/L39/2004.
  NDP leader Jack Layton shares his vision for Canada.
• The Right Balance: Canada’s Conservative Tradition. By Hugh Segal. 2011.
  Call number: JC573.2/C3/S44/2011
• Harperland: The Politics of Control. By Lawrence Martin. 2010.
  Call number: FC640/M37/2010
• Divided Loyalties: The Liberal Party of Canada, 1984-2008. By Brooke Jeffrey. 2010.
  Call number: JL197/L5/J44/2010
• Losing Confidence: Power, Politics, and the Crisis in Canadian Democracy. By Elizabeth May. 2009.
  Call number: JL15/M39/2009.
  Green Party leader Elizabeth looks at the problems in Canadian politics and calls on Canadians to change things.
• Gilles Duceppe: entretiens avec Gilles Toupin. 2010.
  Call number: FC636/D82/T68/2010
• Le Bloc Québécois: 20 ans au nom du Québec. Marie-France Charbonneau & Guy Lachapelle. 2010.
  Call number: JL197/B56/C43/2010
  A history of the Bloc Québécois.
• Le Bloc. By Manon Cornellier. 1995.
  Call number: J1197/B56/C6713/1995.
• Imagine Democracy. By Judy Rebick. 2000.
  Call number: FC635/R42/2000
  Political commentator Judy Rebick offers her vision for a more democratic Canada.
• The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada. By Marci McDonald. 2010.
  Call number: FC640/M33/2010
  Argues that the religious right is having an increasingly large impact on Canadian politics.
• Bastards & Boneheads: Canada’s Glorious Leaders, Past and Present. By Will Ferguson. 1999.
  Call number: FC25/F47/1999.
  A humorous look at past Canadian prime ministers. Which ones were bastards and which were boneheads?
• The Best Laid Plans: A Novel. By Terry Fallis. 2007.
  Call number: PS8611/A45/B47/2007
  For more Canadian political humour, try this novel which satirizes the Ottawa political scene. One of the Top 10 Canada Reads 2011 books.
• Youth voter turnout in Canada. 1, Trends and Issues. By Andre Barnes. Library of Parliament. 2010.
  Call number: Pamphlet Files PRB 2010-19E.
  Also available online.
• Youth voter turnout in Canada. 2, Reasons for the decline and efforts to increase participation. By Myriam Ménard. Library of Parliament. 2010.
  Call number: Pamphlet Files PRB 2010-21E.
  Also available online.

Journals

• The Canadian Political Science Review – Peer-reviewed open access journal, available free online.
• Our subscription databases also contain relevant information on Canadian politics. The ProQuest CBCA database has the Canadian Journal of Political Science (delayed one year). To follow coverage of the election in the press, search the Canadian newspapers available in ProQuest Canadian Newsstand or use EUREKA to search newspaper and other media content in both French and English.

Websites

• Elections Canada. The agency that oversees our elections. Their website includes information for young voters.
• Political parties (in alphabetical order):
  • Bloc Québécois.
  • Conservative Party.
  • Green Party.
  • Liberal Party.
  • NDP.
• Three Hundred Eight. A blog analyzing Canadian political polls. (308 is the number of seats in Parliament.)
• Canada Votes 2011. Election coverage from the CBC.
• Election coverage from Macleans.
• Vote Compass – answer questions on your political opinions and find out which party’s positions are closest to yours.
• How did your neighbourhood vote in 2008? From Cyberpresse, an interactive online map allowing you to see voting results by polling station (the place where people in a given neighbourhood go to vote).

McGill students “vote mob”:

Understanding References and Bibliographies

When you write a term paper or another assignment requiring research, you need to cite the sources that you use (books, articles, website, etc.) and list them in a bibliography.

Failing to properly cite your sources is called plagiarism and is a serious offense. A fun plagiarism tutorial is available from Acadia University.

There are several different sets of rules regarding citations, known as “citation styles”. The three styles in use at Champlain are MLA, APA, and Chicago. Ask your teacher if you’re not sure which style to use for your assignment.

All styles includes rules for formatting the reference or citation that you include at the point in your assignment where you make use of a source, as well as rules for formatting the list of references (often referred to as the bibliography) that comes at the end of your document.

Here are just a few of the differences between the styles:

Style Name	MLA	APA	Chicago
Type of references:	parenthetical (in text)	parenthetical (in text)	footnotes
Bibliography is called:	Works Cited	References	Bibliography

In addition, each style has different rules for formatting the citations and bibliography. All the rules matter, including details like capital letters, commas, and whether initials are used for first names.

Each of these citation styles is based on an entire book. For your convenience, the Library has created summaries of these citation styles. They are available in paper format in the Library or you can download the electronic versions.

To better understand the different parts of a citation, take a look at the guides to the elements of a citation for books and for periodical articles.

Now available: a short video tutorial explaining the basics of citing a book and an article in MLA style:

Videos on APA and Chicago style coming soon!

Tools available to assist with citations:

• Citation Machine – pick a citation style, pick a type of document, then enter the information, and Citation Machine will produce a citation. Please note that you should not put blind faith in an online tool like this; you remain responsible for the resulting citations and should check them carefully to be sure there are no mistakes.
• Zotero – a plug-in that lets you collect sources, organize them, cite them, share them…
• The OWL from Purdue University provides excellent explanation and examples for APA, MLA, and Chicago styles.

Any questions about references and bibliographies? Come to the reference desk or ask us online.

Freedom to Read Week

This week, February 20-26, is Freedom to Read Week, an annual event organized by the Freedom of Expression Committee of the Book and Periodical Council, of which the Canadian Library Association is a member. Freedom to Read Week “encourages Canadians to think about and reaffirm their commitment to intellectual freedom, which is guaranteed them under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

In other words, Freedom to Read Week exists to remind us that we have the right to read the books of our choosing, regardless of whether others approve of our choices.

What is freedom of expression?
Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
– Salman Rushdie

The following video was made by the American Library Association for Banned Books Week:

In honour of Freedom to Read Week, the Champlain Library has put together a display of some of the books which people have attempted to restrict. Photos of the display are available on our Flickr account. Most of these books appear on the Challenged Books and Magazines List where you can find details of the circumstances and the objections that were made.

Books that have been challenged or banned:

• The Handmaid’s Tale. By Margaret Atwood. PS8501/T9/H35/1985
• To Kill a Mockingbird. By Harper Lee. PS3562/E353/T6
• Harry Potter and the philosopher’s stone. By J.K. Rowling. PZ7/R79835/Harp/2000
• Of Mice and Men. By John Steinbeck. PS3537/T3234/O35/1965
• The Indian in the Cupboard. By Lynn Reid Banks. PZ7/B2262/In
• A Clockwork Orange. By Anthony Burgess. PR6052/U638/C53
• Deliverance. By James Dickey. PS3554/I32/D44/1986
• Pornography: Men Possessing Women. By Andrea Dworkin. HQ471/D96/1981b
• The Wars. By Timothy Findley. PS8511/I47/W37
• Black Looks: Race and Representation. By bell hooks. E185.86/H734/1992
• Different Seasons. By Stephen King. PB 10 – 18
• Dance Me Outside. By W.P. Kinsella. PS8571/I5/D3
• The King’s Daughter. By Suzanne Martel. PS8526/A686/J413
• The Satanic Verses. By Salman Rushdie PR9499.3/R8/S28/1989
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover. By D. H. Lawrence PR6023/A93/L2/1982
• On the Banks of Plum Creek. By Laura Ingalls Wilder. PZ7/W6461/On2
• Lives of Girls and Women: a novel. By Alice Munro PS8576/U57/L5
• The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. By Mordecai Richler. PS8535/I3/A7
• Gentle Sinners. By W.D. Valgardson PS8593/A4/G4/1980

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
– Noam Chomsky

Books about censorship:

• 100 banned books: literature suppressed on political, religious, sexual, and social grounds. By Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Bald, and Dawn B. Sova
  Z658/U5/K35/1999
• Alice Walker Banned. PS3573/A425/A64/1996
• Censorship. Edited by Laura K. Egendorf. Z657/C39/2001
• For Rushdie: essays by Arab and Muslim writers in defense of free speech. ByAnouar Abdallah … [et al.]. PR6068/U757/Z8313/1994
• Salman Rushdie sentenced to death. By William J. Weatherby PR9499.3/R8/Z95/1990
• The Rushdie affair : the novel, the Ayatollah, and the West By Daniel Pipes. PR9499.3/R8/S2836/1990
• The Rushdie file. Edited by Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland. PR9499.3/R8/S2837/1990
• Censoring the Web. Written and edited by Kathryn Kolbert with Zak Mettger. KF4775/K65/2001
• Anatomy of censorship: why the censors have it wrong. Harry White. Z658/U5/W49/1997
• Twenty years of censored news. By Carl Jensen and Project Censored. PN4736/J46/1997

Freedom of expression must be considered sacred
and thought can only be corrected by counter thought.
– Naguib Mahfouz

Local Food: Recommended Reading

The second installment of our “recommended reading” series focuses on the local food movement.

Books

• Locavore: From Farmers’ Fields to Rooftop Gardens — How Canadians are Changing the Way We Eat. By Sarah Elton. 2010.
  Call number: TX360/C2/E48/2010
  Presents various steps towards more local food that are going on all around Canada, from artisanal cheese in Quebec to SPIN farmers in city environments. The author also has a blog.
• The 100 Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating. By Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon. 2007.
  Call number at St. Lawrence Library: 641.302/S642m/2007
  Two Vancouverites decide to spend a year eating only food grown and produced within a 100 mile radius of their home.
• Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food. By Gary Paul Nabhan. 2002.
  Call number: TX631/N33/2002
  Long before the 100 mile diet, an Arizona man spends a year focusing on local food.

Journals

• CuiZine: the Journal of Canadian Food Cultures – This journal, published by McGill University, is available online through Erudit. The latest issue deals with the concept of terroir.
• Our subscription databases also contain articles on local food, such as this list of results from EBSCOhost Points of View.

Blogs

There are numerous personal blogs where one or more individuals document their efforts to eat a more local diet, such as the following:

• Seasonal Ontario Food
• Lighthearted Locavore (from New York City).
• The Lovely Locavore Ladies of Boston

The Obesity Epidemic: Recommended Reading

This is the first of a new series of posts in which library staff share recommended reading, whether from books, journals, blogs, or other sources. This week’s suggestions are on the topic of the obesity epidemic.

Books

The following books are part of the Champlain Library collection:

• Globesity: A Planet Out of Control? By Francis Delpeuch, Bernard Maire, Emmanuel Monnier and Michelle Holdsworth. 2009.
  Call number: RC628/T6813/2009
  The authors (three of whom are French and one British) take a global perspective on the obesity epidemic. One interesting idea is the concept of an “obesogenic” environment (a neologism by an Australian, modelled after the term “carcinogenic”), an environment where various factors contribute to making obesity more likely. They also tie together obesity and climate change.
  Note: Selected as an Outstanding Title by CHOICE Reviews.
• Stuffed: An Insider’s Look at Who’s Really Making America Fat. By Hank Cardello with Doug Garr. 2009.
  Call number: RC628/C37/2009
  The author, a former food industry executive, writes about the problems with food companies and how they should change.

Journals

EbscoHost Academic Search Premier covers a lot of obesity research, including from the following journals:

• International Journal of Obesity (12 month delay)
• Obesity Reviews

Blogs

• Dr. Sharma’s Obesity Notes
  Dr. Aryan Sharma is the Scientific Director of the Canadian Obesity Network and the Chair of Obesity Research and Management at the University of Alberta. In his blog he highlights new developments in obesity research and comments on things related to obesity in the news and in popular culture.
• Obesity Panacea
  A blog by two obesity researchers, one a Ph.D candidate and the other a recent Ph.D graduate, that showcases research and advice in the field of obesity, nutrition and physical activity. The recent series of posts on sedentary physiology was particularly interesting, pointing out why it is dangerous to spend too much time sitting even when one exercises regularly.
• Ph.D. Obésité
  Two Université de Sherbrooke researchers (one a Ph.D student in kinesiology, the other a postdoc in endocrinology) cover obesity research in French.
• Weighty Matters
  Another Canadian obesity blog, this one is not from a researcher but from a practicing physician, Dr. Yoni Freedhoff of Ottawa’s Bariatric Medical Institute. He does not hesitate to speak his mind on everything from popular weight loss books to Health Canada’s food guide.

Teachers: Linking to Articles

Do you ever want to have your students read one or more articles available in EbscoHost Academic Search Premier?

Rather than have the articles included in the course pack (which would add to the cost for students), or uploading the article to your Léa or Moodle website (which would violate copyright as well as the College’s license agreement with Ebsco), why not link directly to the article?

To explain this procedure, we have created a brief video tutorial:

You can do the same thing with ProQuest articles (just use the “copy link” button on the article page).

We hope this can help you provide readings to students. If you have any questions, please let us know.

This video and others we have produced are also available on Champlain Library’s Youtube channel.

Open Access Week

This week, October 18-24, is Open Access Week, a time to promote unrestricted online access to scholarly research.

Here’s a brief light-hearted video on open access produced by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL):

Why open access? Well, the norm in scholarly publishing is for authors to give their content to journals, which then charge high subscription fees, causing a journals pricing crisis for libraries, and limiting the potential readership. Instead, the Open Access movement would like scholarly articles to be freely available to everyone who wants to read them.

There are two main ways to provide open access to scholarly content:

• The content can be published in the usual manner and then archived. Some universities maintain an institutional repository or online archive where their researchers may (or in some cases, must) deposit copies of their work. Examples include Spectrum from Concordia University, eScholarship@McGill, and Papyrus from Université de Montréal. You can search for content from many different repositories using OAIster.
• Peer-reviewed journals can publish on an open access model. You can find many of these journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Some of the benefits to open access:

• For the authors: More people will read and cite their work.
• For readers: They have access to the sources they need for their research.
• For libraries: Budgets will not soar out of control.

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has also produced a video for Open Access Week 2010:

For more information on open access, take a look at this overview from Peter Suber of Earlham College.

Virtual Tour of the Library

Check out our library facilities by taking a virtual tour!

Flickr slideshow available here: http://bit.ly/b64DBr

Work Smart! Don’t lose your files or work-in-progress

Here are some tips to keep in mind when using computers in the library:

• Remember that your documents cannot be saved on library computers since files are deleted with each new login.
• Save to a USB key (memory stick) every 5 minutes (in case of a power interruption).
• Email your finished document as an attachment to yourself (in order to have a second copy… just in case).
• To print work from a laptop computer, email the file to yourself or save it to a USB key, then open it at the Express Print computer next to the print server.
• Printing in the library requires a copycard, available from the machine near the photocopiers. (For more on printing and photocopying, see this post.)

Taking these simple precautions can avoid lost work and much frustration!

(Thanks to Dale Huston, Reference Librarian, for these helpful tips.)

NFB Films Available Online

The National Film Board (NFB) has made a large number of its documentaries available online from their online screening room. The Library has now acquired the educational viewing rights to this material, allowing you to legally show these films in a classroom setting. According to Veronica Barton of the NFB, the following material is made available to educators:

• Over 1800 productions online (1007 in English and 793 in French)
• Interactive productions (for example: http://waterlife.nfb.ca )
• 3D films
• User guides
• Grade level and curriculum links (for example : http://www.nfb.ca/film/neighbours_voisins/ )
• Thematic playlists to help you discover hidden treasures
• Closed captioning capabilities
• iPhone and iPad apps to view material on mobile devices

Explore the NFB website to find films for class viewing.

For additional information, you can explore their website (http://www.nfb.ca) as well as follow them on Facebook, on Twitter or via their blog.

If the NFB documentary you wish to show in class is not available online, please contact Angela Borau (aborau @ champlaincollege.qc.ca or extension 357). We will be happy to consider the purchase of a DVD copy.