January 27 2011

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The rise of the musical underdog

The ukulele comes to serenade U of T

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the newspaper University of Toronto’s Independent Weekly

PanAm Games budget doubles

Why the UTSC aquatic centre is costing an extra $23 million MartÍn WalDMan A staff report released at City Hall last week showed that the cost of the 2015 Pan-Am Games in Toronto will not only exceed the city’s initial $49.5 million budget announced in February of 2009, but will in fact be nearly double that, at an estimated $96.5 million. A major factor in the budget increase is the excavation of a former landfill at U of T Scarborough North Campus, the planned site of the Pan-Am Games aquatic venue. To make construction viable, the land has to be remediated, at a cost of about $23 million. Mayor Rob Ford and members

Vol. XXXIII N0. 1

January 27, 2011

Great Minds brainstorm corporate takedown

MartÍn WalDMan

of the city Executive Committee expressed shock at the figures before them, and promised that Toronto would not be on the hook for any further “surprise” expenses that appeared between now and the event itself. The doubling of the Pan-Am price tag does not come as a surprise to community groups such as No Games Toronto, which provided some of the most vocal opposition to the event in the months leading up to Toronto’s selection as the host city. Their central criticisms revolved around the inevitable cost overruns that the municipal and provincial governments would be saddled with. Citing

This past Saturday, Sidney Smith Hall hosted Great Minds for Whose Future?, an anticorporitazation teach-in that was the latest event in a growing overall discussion about corporate influence at U of T. A panel of speakers discussed the effects of corporatization and how to combat its ongoing influence, and while much discussion with respect to U of T was centred around the role of Peter Munk and Barrick Gold, panelists also included an organizer in similar anti-corporatization campaigns at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as a speaker from the the Extractive Industries Research Group at York University. The ongoing trend of universities seeking out private donations is certainly not a new phe-

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Continued on page 2

Reclaiming U of T campaign aims at private donor influence on campus

U of T library embarks on massive digitization project 130,000,000 pages and counting

BODI BOLD

sanDra DeGranDis

Digital archivists work in a silent atmosphere on Robarts seventh floor, archiving documents for U of T’s new library digitization effort in collaboration with Internet Archive Canada.

With Google books and devices like Kindle giving people the opportunity to access reading material online, it is no wonder that the digitization of books and other documents is gaining popularity. Many European nations have made great efforts to digitize historical documents including books, photographs, newspapers and even broadcasting material. Though Canada does not yet have a cohesive national plan to digitize its print and historical documents, U of

T has been working in partnership with Internet Archive Canada in order to digitize about 300,000 public-domain books. While digitization of printed material has its supporters and dissenters, the benefits from such a process seem to outweigh the cons. Most books or other historical documents are only available in specific libraries and only to the people that have access to them. Likewise, out of print materials are hard to come by. Through digitization, these and other types of mateContinued on page 6


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