After nearly two weeks of silence surrounding negotiations between the Toronto Public Library and the Toronto Public Library Workers Union (TPLWU), it was announced today that the Ontario Ministry of Labour has granted the TPLWU a legal strike deadline of 12:01 a.m. Monday, Nov. 9.

As reported by Q&Q Omni last March, the city’s 2,400 library workers split from the Toronto Civic Employees Union (TCEU) Local 416 to create their own union. However, the new TPLWU soon found itself facing the same concession demands confronted by the TCEU in a summer that saw an extended strike by city workers. 

Eighty-six per cent of TPLWU voted in favour of a strike as of Oct. 10, but negotiations are ongoing.

The union is asking the TPL for more full-time jobs and “fairer treatment of part-time workers.”

According to a TPL inter-office memo, should a legal strike/lock-out occur, the following disruptions are to be expected:

• All library branches and facilities, including Bookmobile and Home Library Services, would be closed
• All computer services, including Web-based and dial-in service, would be suspended, including renewals
• All telephone-based service would be suspended, including renewals
• All scheduled meetings and events would be cancelled. Room rental charges would be refunded, as appropriate
• All book drops would be closed. Borrowers would be asked to keep library materials and not return them until a strike/lock-out is over

Sundry links from around the Web:

• In honour of Leonard Cohen’s 75th birthday yesterday, 1 Heck of a Guy comes up with an incomplete list of Cohen’s many nicknames. Quillblog favourites: #22: Master of the Egg Salad Sandwich and #60: Poet of Swinging Suicides
• A 700-plus page “utopian fantasy” starring superheroes Bill Cosby and Yoko Ono? Yes, it’s Ralph Nader’s “quirky fiction debut” 
• Can’t get enough of Dan Brown mania? Here are 10 titles to tide you over after The Last Symbol tsunami 
• Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Giving Tree? EW’s Shelf Life  picks classic children’s books they’d like to see given the Hollywood treatment 
• Margaret Atwood tells The New York Times why she scares herself 
• Despite previous concerns, the Philadelphia Free Library System is NOT shutting down  

Some book-related links:

• Where the Brooklyn Public Library hides the offensive books
• William Golding was not the lord of his own fly
• Travels in Alice Munro country
• How John Grisham helped free the Norfolk Four
• Five sci-fi and fantasy books that never should have been written

Jet-setting author Richard Poplak travelled to 17 different countries to research his latest book, which looks at the influence of American pop culture in the Muslim world, and he’s Q&Q’s cover subject in the May 2009 issue. Also in the issue, we look at the surprising success of Harlequin Enterprises at 60 and at how print-on-demand is changing the bookstore of the future. Our Library Special Report examines the tricky task of putting Canada’s archival history online. Plus reviews of new books by Colin McAdam, Emily Schultz, Giles Blunt, Lynn Johnston, Barry Callaghan, and more.

Pop goes the world
Richard Poplak bets that tawdry TV and banal bubblegum can bring cultures together

Print-on-demand: The dream and the reality
The bookstore of the future, and why POD machines are waiting for books in the present

Love wins out
While other major publishers are bleeding money, Harlequin Enterprises is raking it in. How the firm has managed to beat the odds

History, bit by bit
What’s the best way to put our national heritage online?
AND MORE IN THE LIBRARY SPECIAL REPORT: Coping with rising patron demand, and learning to LOL at the reference desk

FRONTMATTER

• Ninety minutes with Stuart Ross
• Comedy is easy, kidlit is hard
• The adventures of Pierre Turgeon: a timeline
• Cover to Cover: Lauren Kirshner’s Where We Have to Go
• Snapshot: Alexandra Moore of Word on the Street
• Breakwater unbroken
• David Bezmozgis moves from control to collaboration

REVIEWS

• Heaven Is Small by Emily Schultz
• Though You Were Dead by Terry Griggs
• The English Stories by Cynthia Flood
• Plus more fiction, non-fiction, and poetry

BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

• Dance Baby Dance by Andrea Spalding
• Dracula Madness by Mary Labatt and Jo Rioux
• Soccer Sabotage by Liam O’Donnell and Mike Deas
• Swim the Fly by Don Calame
• Plus more fiction, non-fiction, and picture books

THE Q&Q/BOOKNET CANADA BESTSELLERS

THE LAST WORD
Lesley Choyce does the math on three decades in writing

Ontario’s Ministry of Education has released the full list of approved vendors that the province’s school libraries may use when spend ingthis year’s $15-million funding boost. The full list of 72 vendors is below, and includes library wholesalers, Indigo, some indie booksellers, and a handful of publishers.

There is, of course, no guarantee that any given firm on the list will end up selling any books; that’s up to individual school systems. Recently, for example, the Toronto District School Board announced its own plans for spending its share of the money; the board has invited about half of the vendors below to a one-time selling fair.

• A Different Booklist
• A Different Drummer Books
• Another Story Bookshop
• Bacon & Hughes Limited
• Benchmark Education Company
• Blue Heron Books
• BookLore Stores Inc.
• Bryan Prince Bookseller
• CanLit for Kids Books Ltd.
• Rand McNally
• CFORP/Libairie du Centre
• Collected Works Bookstore
• Coloursports Publishing Inc
• Crabtree Publishing Company
• Duncan Systems Specialists Inc.
• Edu Reference Publishers Direct Inc.
• Ella Minnow Children’s Bookstore
• emc notes inc.
• ESL Shop
• Fitzhenry & Whiteside
• Flanker Press Ltd.
• Follett International
• Formac Lorimer Books
• Furby House Books Ltd.
• GoodMinds.com
• Grampa’s Attic & Bookstore
• Green Gables Books
• Greenley’s Bookstore Inc.
• Groundwood Books Ltd.
• Gulliver’s Quality Books and Toys
• Indigo Books & Music Inc.
• Kaleidoscope Kids’ Books
• Kent Bookstore Ltd.
• Le Coin du livre (central) Ltee
• Librairie du Soleil
• Library Services Centre
• London West Resource Centre
• Mabel’s Fables Ltd
• Manticore Books
• McCarney and Associates Inc.
• McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited
• Millennia Books Limited
• Nelson Education Ltd.
• Nickname Press
• Orca Book Publishers Ltd
• Oxford University Press Canada School Division
• Pembroke Publishers Limited
• Perma-Bound Canada
• Regroupement des editeurs canadiens-francais
• Riverwood Publishers Ltd.
• S&B Books Ltd.
• Saunders Book Company
• Scholastic Canada Ltd. Scholastic Education
• School Book Fairs Limited
• The Beguiling Books
• The Book Keeper
• The Bookstore at Western University of Western Ontario
• The Freckled Lion
• The Gateway to Knowledge Inc.
• The Gravenhurst Book Store
• The LoonsNest Books & Gifts
• The OLAStore
• The Village Bookshop Inc.
• Tinlids Inc.
• United Library Services
• Westerhof Media
• Whitehots Inc. Canadian Library Services
• Wintergreen Learning Materials
• Words Worth Books Limited
• World Book Educational Products of Canada
• Worlds Collide
• YouAreSpecial.com

• HarperCollins in the U.S. has laid off two executives and announced the scuttling of its four-year-old Collins division. In more bad news, the company revealed today that it’s also closing the shortlived Bowen Press.
• BookExpo America adopts a shorter schedule and announces it will stay in New York City through 2012.
• Architectural onomatopoeia: Two library facades designed to look like bookshelves.
• The Los Angeles Times on the digital libraries of the future.

Ontario’s elementary school libraries – and the retailers and wholesalers that supply them with books – can breathe a sigh of relief: a much needed influx of funding, promised by Premier Dalton McGuinty during the 2007 election campaign, has finally come through.

The initial influx of $15-million (part of a promised $80-million) has already been divvied up among individual school boards, with each elementary school in the province set to receive a base sum of $1,500, plus additional monies calculated based on school size. The libraries can use that money to buy books from a list of 73 qualified vendors, who applied to the program last fall.

The list of vendors was first due to appear as early as last October, and the delay prompted concerns that the funds would not be forthcoming.

However, agreements with qualified retailers and wholesalers began to go out last week, and the ministry expects to have deals in place by the end of February, at which point the school libraries can begin placing orders. (For now, the vendor list has yet to be made public.) Those agreements will be valid for two years, a ministry spokesperson told Quillblog, with the ministry having the option to extend the agreement by two more years after that.

Watch Q&Q Omni for more coverage.

It was supposed to be a new library for a new millennium, but within 24 hours of the launch of Europeana, an EU initiative to store millions of documents in a searchable online repository, the database came tumbling to the ground. According to the Associated Press, a relaunch isn’t planned until mid-December.

The site crashed after registering 10-million visits per hour, The Guardian reports:

The project was born of a fear among European leaders and culture bosses that Google was dominating the web, with its Book Search project scanning millions of books from dozens of world libraries to boost its traffic.

Europeana goes further by providing interactive content, audio and video, ranging from original texts of Dante’s Divine Comedy and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, to footage of the fall of the Berlin wall or 1970s documentaries on the pornographic film market in France. The site will feature pieces such as the 1215 Magna Carta and a painting by Domenico di Michelino – Dante illuminating Florence with his Poem – as well as 80,000 broadcasts from French national archives, including footage from the first world war.

Like Google, access to the trove of material is free; but unlike the mighty search giant, Europeana will only host material already in the public domain.

The longlist for the richest award for writing in English has been announced. And the longlist is, in fact, long, with 147 authors in contention for the 2009 Impac Dublin prize of £100,000.

From the Guardian:

The list, drawn from any fiction published in English — including translations — is made up of nominations from 157 libraries in 117 cities and 41 countries worldwide. Selected books include most of the literary novels rewarded elsewhere in the last year, as well as titles less familiar to British readers. Perhaps the most unexpected appearance on the list is from Ken Follett, best known for his bestselling techno-thrillers, whose World Without End is the sequel to his medieval epic The Pillars of the Earth.

The selected titles now go forward for judging to a panel of five novelists — Gabrielle Alioth, Rachel Billington, Vesna Goldsworthy, James Ryan and Timothy Taylor — chaired by the former U.S. appeals judge Eugene R. Sullivan.

Canadian contenders on the list include Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero, which was nominated by 13 libraries (making it the second most-popular book, behind A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, which received 18 nominations); Effigy by Alissa York; Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay; October by Richard B. Wright; Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani;  Soucouyant by David Chariandy; Spanish Fly by Will Ferguson; The Architects Are Here by Michael Winter; The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill; The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland; The Lost Highway by David Adams Richards; The Milk Chicken Bomb by Andrew Wedderburn; and The Outlander by Gil Adamson.

Rawi Hage took the prize last year for De Niro’s Game.

The Toronto Public Library has released its second annual “first and best” list. Masterminded by Ken Setterington, the library’s child and youth advocate (who was named one of Q&Q’s CanLit 30 earlier this year), the list highlights recommended Canadian titles for children. A brief Toronto Star item on this year’s list is here, and last year’s list is here.

The 2008 titles are listed below, with links to Q&Q reviews where available.

• Chicken, Pig, Cow by Ruth Ohi (Annick Press)
• It’s Moving Day by Pamela Hickman; Geraldo Valério, illus. (Kids Can Press)
• Little Panda by Renata Liwska (Houghton Mifflin/Thomas Allen & Son)
• One Watermelon Seed by Celia Barker Lottridge; Karen Patkau, illus. (Fitzhenry & Whiteside)
• A Pocket Can Have a Treasure in It by Kathy Stinson; Deirdre Betteridge, illus. (Annick Press)
• Ready for Winter (and Spring, Summer, Autumn – four-book series), by Marthe Jocelyn (Tundra Books)
• The Sweetest One of All by Jean Little; Marisol Sarrazin, illus. (Scholastic Canada)
• Thing-Thing by Cary Fagan; Nicolas Debon, illus. (Tundra Books)
• Time Is When by Beth Gleick; Marthe Jocelyn, illus. (Tundra Books)
• A Visitor for Bear by Bonny Becker; Kady MacDonald Denton, illus. (Candlewick Press/Penguin Canada)