Rotary Club of Burlington Central 26th of November 2015.
Club President Bryce Leggatt brought the meeting to order and apologised for his casual appearance but he would be "bombing around town delivering poinsettias" on this the first delivery date. Jim Brindle introduced our guests, our own exchange student Augustina, Dimitre Atanassov, Elliott Vine, Dick Scott, Maureen Barry, our speaker for the day, and Frank Simkevitz from the Jewish National Fund, guest of Cuppy Katz.
Janet Canavan in absentia thanked the club and the committees for all their work towards providing a fantastic grand concert at the end of the Burlington Rotary music festival.
Anisa Hilborn from the Joseph Brant Hospital foundation thanks the club for its support of the new build and is providing donor impact brochures. There will be a talk on the subject forthcoming.
We were reminded to obtain rewards certificates from the local supermarkets that will be given to food banks and also that the first Thursday of every month will be the day to bring non-perishable goods for the food bank.
We are still looking at how we can be involved with the arriving Syrian refugees and it appears there is something of a broken front with numerous different organizations involved in various ways but hopefully, at a meeting at Mainway, on Tuesday 1 December at 7 PM there will be a general meeting on the subject and hopefully many answers will be given at that time.
The Santa Claus Parade will be this Sunday 29th November starting officially at 1 o'clock though the Burlington Central float probably won't start until about 2 pm given the number of floats. It's hoped that there will be eight people to walk with the float and to help. It will go from Prospect Street by Canadian Tire and will be attended by the other three clubs. We are encouraged to bring children and grandchildren to walk along and cards and candy canes will be distributed. There is likely to be 10,000 people to welcome the parade. For those interested in being involved with decorating the float there will be activity starting at nine 9 AM on Sunday at the city bus depot on Harvester Road. Sheila Welham has involved the Rotaract and Interact young people in this project.
Andrew Gaydon and Ron Lambert are to be congratulated for the tremendous poinsettia drive in support of Polio Plus and the sales have been close to $20,000. This will be a $10-$12,000 to the club's fundraising efforts.
Frank Simkevitz addressed the club on the subject of the Jewish National Fund's upcoming tour of Israel which has been hugely successful in the past and typically visits historical, religious, and natural sites and demonstrates extraordinary diversity of life in Israel. It's an opportunity to meet Israelis in that warm, inviting and fascinating country. He describes as uniquely vibrant, alive and very functional society, an island in turmoil ridden region. He emphasise the excellent security afforded the visitors. There will be visiting the JMF site and the Paul Harris Memorial Forest. The trip will be in March 2016 from the 13th of the 23rd and will cost approximately $3500 Canadian organ. The trip represents extraordinarily good value.
Augustina talked about her week spent with exchange students and attending the YMCA Peace Award breakfast.
Bernie Hanna, one of the three sergeants at arms, noted Albert Schmid's birthday. Before Bernie could suggest that the club sing happy birthday, Albert paid up $20 to keep them quiet! Joanna Hahn is also celebrating a birthday. Cup Katz is celebrating having finally sold his house. More important to him however was to be able to celebrate having got his driver's license back again after his illness about a year ago. He thanked all the drivers who had made it possible for him to get back and forth to club meetings during that time including Rob Sybersma, Albert Schmid and others. He will be going for four months to Florida.
Bernie is looking forward to 10 days travelling in Arizona and having a good rest.
Richard Pass celebrates his wife's recent cataract operation. David Roscoe and Robert Martin are celebrating various family events. Lawrence Leung was thankful for a donation that was made to the Senior Centre Choir.
The Club Christmas party will be on December 18 at Lawrence's condominium party room.
Peter Thoem recalled the excellent and very successful Telling Tales Festival. Apart from being hugely successful in introducing children to literacy, the event produced a $12,000 profit. Peter Thoem was invited to be part of the committee that decided where to distribute these funds. Awards are being given to Early Literacy Hamilton a "Read to Your Baby" initiative, the Rotary Summer Literacy program, and to Hamilton Literacy Council.
Our guest speaker today is Maureen Barry, CEO of the Burlington Public library. She is a native of Dundas and spoke to us on the subject of public libraries "Not your grandmother's library". Libraries have changed dramatically over the centuries and the change continues. They started with verbal sharing of information to clay tablets to parchment, to books and finally to multimedia. There is nothing that will keep people away from seeking to obtain and to share information. The first Burlington Public library was on Brant Street in the town offices moving then to Elizabeth Street and finally to New Street into a rather ugly, poured concrete building which fortunately was given a major facelift and reconceived by an excellent architect.
Books have not entirely given way to other forms of multimedia. Access to information has led to creativity and reinvention and libraries have become a chosen destination for many people.
Maureen Barry went recently on an 11 day tour of libraries in North America and Europe. She gave a fascinating slideshow viewing many of the world's finest libraries which embody extraordinary and quite wonderful architecture as well as totally reinventing the way in which libraries work; a library in the Netherlands that is a 24/7 library that can be accessed even without staff, outside of normal hours. Libraries have become very interactive. Many forms of art are exhibited within libraries and the creation of art is encouraged within some libraries. Many libraries have been built in parts of cities that were quite depressed revitalising them, sometimes using reclaimed land. She described library design that came as a result of years of conferring with the community in order to design a space that will be of most use and most acceptable to the community. Many libraries have personal workspaces, computers centres, performance spaces, media labs, meeting points for businesses, even restaurants. There are libraries that loan instruments and provide labs for creation of music.
An important group to engage is young people who to start with seemed primarily interested in using the computers for videogames but this has matured and branched out into far more creative use of the library space by many young people. In Finland where there is still obligatory military service, working in the public sector is an acceptable alternative and many young people have chosen libraries to work in.
Libraries are repositories of historical data relating to the communities and there are innovative ways of allowing people to contribute to that record with information and anecdotes about their own area.
Many libraries are carefully constructed and designed to blend with the natural environment with beautiful views of parks and green spaces.
Canada has its fair share of magnificent libraries including Cambridge, Kitchener, Calgary, Surrey BC, Halifax, Vancouver, Québec, and not to forget Burlington. The new library in the new Hayden high school in Alton Village is a blend of public library and school library and is architecturally magnificent.
Librarians are being embedded in the community to try and find out what the community wants. Students and seniors are given the opportunity to collaborate and to display works within the library. The Burlington Central library is developing a Makerspace where there will be opportunities to use sewing machines, knitting machines, creation of robots, laser and vinyl cutters.
Libraries continue to face their challenges over the purchase of the many forms of multimedia as well as traditional books being held by library and costs are a major challenge. Clearly libraries around the world require constantly to innovate and the message is that they are more than ready to meet these challenges.
Margaret was thanked by Roy Cooper for her fascinating presentation. I would urge the reader to Google "libraries and architecture" or to go to
http://ebookfriendly.com/modern-libraries/ to see some of the remarkable libraries around the world many of them things of great beauty and fascination.
Anthony Ford-Jones
