PowerBlog

The Nippon Foundation is an independent, non-profit organization which supports a variety of projects designed to promote an understanding of Japan overseas (go here for more info). They do a lot of different things, including donating "...carefully selected books that provide information on contemporary Japan” to libraries around the world - including this one. Because of our Asian Studies Program, we applied for and received a great collection of about 40 of these books on subjects ranging from Japanese film, Manga and literature to politics, business and history. They are currently on display in the Reference Room (far right corner), they're all in English and they can all be borrowed. To show you what I mean, here's the list of titles: Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film Oe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan Broadcasting Politics in Japan: NHK and Television News Constructing Civil Society in Japan: Voices of Envi...

...and so do the students who use it. We had another successful Food For Fines campaign this year! Thanks to you, our campus food bank received 343 food items as well as $108 in donations. This is a win-win-win situation. Students get their fines cut in half, the food bank gets re-stocked and we get our books back. And it's not just here at Saint Mary's. This is a Novanet initiative. So food banks in communities across Nova Scotia benefit - Halifax, Sydney, Antigonish, Truro, wherever there's a NSCC campus. So congratulations to whoever came up with the original idea and congratulations to those of you who make it work year after year.

Or perhaps your taste runs more to The Walrus, Maisonneuve, Film Comment or Wired. Whatever magazines you like to read in your spare time (yeah, I know, what spare time?), you can now find a lot of them in the library. We've started a bunch of new subscriptions this year (including all of the above) to go along with the old favourites (Time, MacLeans, National Geographic, etc.). You can find them, and many more, in what was, until recently, the library's lobby (everybody but first years know where I mean). Come into the library, go through the glass doors in the far right corner and you'll walk right into them. Well, actually, you'll walk right into shelves of newspapers. But keep on going. Persevere. Eventually you'll hit a tall grey display unit full of the latest issues of about 80 of the most popular magazines around. Maybe you'll discover one you didn't know about. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to drag you away from your academic pu...