Monday, July 10, 2017

Student wins award for actions and advocacy to end sexual violence

The Provincial Draw-The-Line Post-Secondary Sexual Violence Prevention Awards recognize actors on campuses across Ontario that have developed innovative ways of addressing and re-defining sexual violence prevention programming on campus. 

Sarah Wiley, a psychology major with a sexuality, marriage, and family minor at the University of Waterloo, embodies these values as a student leader and change-agent in the University of Waterloo community. Wiley has been honoured as one of the summer 2017 award recipients for her contributions to the fight against unacceptable attitudes and behaviours about sexual violence on campus.

Wiley has been a board member of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance, for whom she co-authored the 2016 Sexual Violence Prevention and Response Policy Paper. In the wake of the paper, she has actively lobbied the Government of Ontario to adopt its key policy recommendations. In June of 2017, a new bill incorporating one of the paper's key proposals for sexual violence prevention was tabled.

She recently finished her term as the Vice-President Education with the Federation of Students and has been a very active student leader with the Women’s Centre and HeforShe. Sarah also is a Board Member and Public Education Volunteer with the Sexual Assault Support Centre of Waterloo Region.

Read more about Sarah Wiley in this Faculty of Arts news release.

Project to help historians see the Web as it was

Visualization showing link structures within the archived Web, 2006 to 2014. Image from UWaterloo's Web Archives for Historical Research Group

The University of Waterloo and York University have been awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to make petabytes of historical internet content accessible to scholars and others interested in researching the recent past.

The grant, valued at $610,625, supports Archives Unleashed, a project that will develop web archive search and data analysis tools to enable scholars and librarians to access, share, and investigate recent history since the early days of the World Wide Web. It is additionally supported by generous in-kind and financial contributions from Start Smart Labs, Compute Canada, York University Libraries and the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Arts.    

“We want to unleash web archive collections by allowing scholars and curators to systematically filter, aggregate, analyze, and visualize content,” says Professor Ian Milligan, the project lead and expert in digital history at the University of Waterloo’s Department of History, 

Nick Ruest, digital assets librarian at York University and lead developer on the projects, says it will be a sea change for digital historians. “The systems we are building will dramatically lower the barrier to entry for students, researchers, librarians, and archivists to use web archives in their work,” says Ruest. “It is absolutely critical that these systems exist so that more researchers can truly examine this abundance of web archival data.”

Read the full article.

Library unveils UW at 60 exhibit

A message from the Library.

Did you know that:

Waterloo’s first students started classes in the heat of early July in portable classrooms?

Enrolment jumped from just 74 students in 1957 to over 1100 in the 1961-1962 academic year?

Visit Special Collections & Archives’ new exhibit: UW @ 60

Come and see Dr. Hagey’s robes, a school jacket from a 1965 graduate, and an early chemist’s bottle from the School of Pharmacy, as well as many photos taken around the University over the past 60 years!

UW @ 60 will be on display in the Doris Lewis Rare Book Room until September 29, 2017.

Congratulating new retirees

Human Resources has announced the following staff retirements, effective July 1:

• Don Pastway, who joined Waterloo in March 1987, retires as Custodian I in Plant Operations;
• Lynnette Hoyles, who started at the University in May 1978, retires as Plant Growth Facility Manager in Biology;
• H. John Anderson, who began working at Waterloo in January 2001, retires as Business Developer in Co-operative Education and Career Action;
• Sheila Fell, who started at Waterloo in October 1988, retires as Switchboard Operator in IST;
• Harry Meier; who joined the University in April 1971, retires as Stationary Engineer 3rd Class in Plant Operations; and
• Larry Marks, who began working at Waterloo in September 1975, retires as Residence Facilities Co-ordinator in Housing.

Human Resources has also announced the following faculty member retirements, effective July 1:

• Professor Rick Wiggins, who joined the University in July 1976, retires from the School of Optometry and Vision Science;
• Professor Edward Sudicky, who started at Waterloo in January 1985, retires form Earth and Environmental Sciences;
• Professor Stuart McGill, who began working at Waterloo in January 1988, retires from Kinesiology.