Excited to attend the BC Studies conference at UBC next week! Will be wonderful to chair a few sessions. And, thank you, Leanne for the lovely new bag. Always a pleasure to write book reviews for the journal.

Musings from the Pacific coast about books, history, education, and libraries
Excited to attend the BC Studies conference at UBC next week! Will be wonderful to chair a few sessions. And, thank you, Leanne for the lovely new bag. Always a pleasure to write book reviews for the journal.

Throughout March and April in Victoria, the streets and parks are filled with beautiful Japanese Sakura [cherry blossom] trees. When I grew up in Vancouver, there was an annual Sakura festival which is still going strong.
Here is a beautiful haiku that won the 2006 Vancouver Sakura festival poetry competition.
the long road
boughs of white blossoms
light the way
Helen Baker, North Vancouver







Pleased to write another blog post for European colleagues at the International Network for Education History Collections (INEHC). And, this time my friend and colleague, Chaa’winisaks at Royal Roads University, worked alongside me with developing this piece which is titled, “Animals, The North, and settler-colonialism in historical educational media: A comparison of Dutch and Canadian sources in the early 1900s.” Our recent post is inspired by my INEHC colleague from the Nationaal Onderwijsmuseum [National Museum of Education] in the Netherlands Jacques Dane, who wrote an excellent blog post in November 2024, titled ‘Animal love in the classroom.’ Our recent post considers conceptions of ‘The North’ through a comparison of a Dutch wall chart from 1911 and a British Columbia geography textbook used in schools between 1899 and 1910. If you are interested in blog posts about BCHT, here’s another one I wrote last fall for colleagues at University College London when I was a Liberating the Collections Fellow at the Institute of Education’s Research Institute for Collections. So many compelling similarities and differences. This one’s a long one, so get comfy!





Thank you to the lovely Sara Cassidy for inviting me to speak about Children’s Librarianship in her course WRIT 407: Writing for children and young adults. This group asked excellent questions about how to build inclusive and responsive library collections, the pathways to becoming a librarian focused on youth readers, and how to professionally navigate an era of increasingly challenged books for children. If you are interested in becoming a children’s librarian, it is a great gig. Happy to chat about pathways to the profession anytime; feel free to book an appointment with me.
Sara is a wonderful local, children’s author; one of my favourite of her recent books is Kunoichi Bunny published by Orca. WRIT 407 students are so fortunate to have Sara as their instructor. Happy writing!
