Clarification

It's the end of the term. Our brains aren't crammed to capacity with bits of school related knowledge. So, I figured that this would be a good time to remind you that FLIF blog will continue to update over the summer. It may not be updated as frequently as we have strived to update it throughout the school year, but it will be updated nonetheless.

So, feel free to alert us to anything that we should post, any cool links, and actions we should be promoting.

Privacy and confidentiality

Promoting privacy and confidentiality may seem counter to the idea of intellectual freedom and anti-censorship, but I think that it is important to under stand the importance of privacy and confidentiality in some contexts. Don Wood has written and interesting post: Why privacy and confidentiality are important.

Hometown Baghdad

This is really amazing : Hometown Baghdad. It's a web documentary of life in Baghdad. I've only watched a few of the episodes so far, but they have been really fascinating. We forget that Canada is a peaceful, relatively safe place to be that does not require baracading ourselves in our houses to stay safe.

Source: Thanks to Tanya

Remembering the looting of the Iraq National Museum

Four years and one week ago, between April 10th and 12th 2003, the Iraq National Museum was broken into, looted and a lot of old and valuable things were destroyed. The group SAFE (Saving Antiquities for Everyone) issued a call for candlelight vigils to be held. So, last week FLIF hosted such an event. Sadly, I was unable to attend, but I wanted to post about it because (a) I should have last week (please forgive me fellow FLIFers) and (b) I think that it is important for us to recognize that this kind of stuff is going on. Furthermore, the looting is being supported by buyers. People are buying illegally obtained national and historical treasures. And, many of those people are getting awya with it.

The destruction is terrible too (though, I have noted that looting garners more attention then damage done because of bombs and such - I guess no one wants to admit that they and their bombs are just as much at fault). At least when an item is stolen, it still exists somewhere. There's still hope that it will find its way back to where it belongs. But, when it is destroyed, then we lose a vluable piece of history. Not just that of Iraq, but of the world.

Hopefully the candlelight vigils will bring awareness to the masses - let them know that there is a whole lot more to Iraq then alledged terrorists and desert and humble little villages. There was also a history, a culture, and intellectual thread that deserves to be preserved.

End of term madness

Sorry for the lack of posts ... it's the end of term and we are all feeling a bit overwhelmed with final projects.

Just for the record, this blog will continue through out the summer ... it is meant to be a continuous project, and we will strive to keep it as such.

More about the BC Legislative library

In response to our last post, Sylvia gave us a link to her blog: Save the Legislative Library of B.C.! Check it out - there's some iteresting stuff there.