The Stacks
Please note that you may be seeing a filtered view of our stacks.
Check the url to confirm, or click the header above at any time to reload the full contents.
Time Travelling with Rare Print Materials
So back in January my fellow student staffer at Bruce Peel Special Collections, Michaela Morrow, and I had the privilege and delight to lead a Peel Workshop of our own design, titled Time Travelling with Rare Print Materials. Basically it was a chance for us to pull an absolute treasure trove of materials from the collection, share them with friends and patrons, and – perhaps the biggest bonus to me – spend some extra time studying them ourselves.
And what a trove it was…
Ready or not, here I come…
Ray Bradbury once said “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” As a book nerd, student librarian, and global citizen, I think about that quote almost daily.
And as a student librarian, I’m learning that there is yet another tactic – make the books unfindable…
Bread and representation
Back on October 15, we had a book launch up at the local indie bookstore where our Head Alien hangs one of his many hats on the regular. He arrived to have a fellow bookseller exclaim “Hey! Did you know you’re in the book?”
No, no he did not…
The Comic as Object Project
As part of our Head Alien’s ongoing studies at the University of Alberta School of Library and Information Studies, this project starts with a basic, and I think self-evident, premise taken from a different medium altogether – that a video call is not the same as an in-person meeting…
Book News: A push for free textbooks
For this week’s addition to the library school book news project we’re stepping a bit outside the usual trade book publishing focus here at The Butterflies & Aliens Library. But in the big business that is publishing, textbook publishing is the biggest. So as a bibliophile and a student, any push to make textbooks free is going to get my attention…
Book News: Sensitivity Readers in Publishing
For this week’s contribution to the library school book news project, I wanted to share a CBC article exploring the rise of “sensitivity readers” in publishing. It relates to many of the topics that have come up in the course, including representation and diversity in publishing, the fine line between editing and self-censorship, and the not-so-fine and much muddier line between censorship versus serving your audience… which may or may not be the same as catering to the market…
Solarpunk
Following up on my recent post about Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series, I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the “solarpunk” subgenre to which these two novellas belong. This is what I found…
Book News: The bookstore is the most recession-proof business in America for 2023
This week in our library school book news project, the topics touched on, among other things, the role of bookstores within the larger publishing ecosystem. Given our close connections with localn independent bookstores in particular here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library, this was a particularly interesting topic to dig into…
Book Mail: Life Beyond Us
Just wanted to do a quick share of one of the Butterflies & Aliens Library’s latest acquisitions, Life Beyond Us, edited by Julie Nováková, Lucas K. Law, and Susan Forest, and published by Laksa Media Group in partnership with the European Astrobiology Institute…
Book News: Open Access!
For our book news project, the topic of this week’s class was scholarly publishing, but for me the real revelations were about open access books – in other words, books being shared for free because the author and publisher think they should be shared…
Book News: Markus Dohle’s Big Flop
With this week’s books news assignment topic looking at trade publishing, I came across this article that does a bit of a deep dive into the aftermath of the proposed merger of ‘Big Five’ publishing giants Penguin Random House (PRH) and Simon & Schuster (S&S)…
Book News: Some alternatives to “big media”
So rather than going into a deep dive into the many problems in new media industries and news, for this week’s book news assignment I figured I’d kind of not actually quite follow the assignment and just throw some options out for publishing alternatives to the conglomerates and chains and monster media corporations…
