The Calgary Public Library (CPL) website has a colourful and busy home page. As a result, finding the link to the blogs page took me a few minutes, as it didn’t occur to me to scroll down until I had gotten frustrated enough. If I had done so sooner, I would have noticed the More blogs link in the bottom right corner of the home page, under a list of what I had assumed to be pages to specific resources. The list includes 16 individually designed and original blogs, all linked back to the CPL homepage. Each blog also has a search capability, and some have plenty of tags and links to other related sites and blogs. For example, Eco – Action, a “green site devoted to the environment and building a more sustainable community”, includes the following links in its sidebar: Eco Bloggers, Staff Eco-Action Newsletter, Green Tips, Sites We Like, Ecological Footprint Calculator and Tags. While the blogs are well integrated with the rest of the website, there appear to be no other Web 2.0 technologies with which to integrated—at least, I couldn’t find any.
The variety of blogs suggests that CPL is making an effort to serve all community members, however, I struggled in vain to find any blog or blog post about First Nations Calgarians. I found only one mention of First Nations or “Natives” in a post about the Calgary Stampede posted on the Community Heritage and Family History blog, which includes under the tag “Interesting Calgarians” posts titled When Irish Eyes Are…Calgarian and Black History Month, but no references to First Nations Calgarians. This is a serious omission, in light of the fact that Calgary had “the second largest Aboriginal population among cities in Alberta in 2006”, according to Statistics Canada. Thus, CPL cannot yet claim to provide “the best public library service to all Calgarians”, as it does in its Charter.
