Brain Awareness Week activities
Memorial University is helping to celebrate Brain Awareness Week March 15-21 with two events for high school students. This year’s Brain Storm competition will be held at Holy Heart High School on Bonaventure Avenue, St. John’s, from 1-3 p.m. on Thursday, March 18.

Several celebrity guests will pose the questions and 17 students from four local schools are already confirmed to compete. Two neuroscience researchers from the Faculty of Medicine will act as judges. The top three students will receive cash prizes and there will also be participation awards for all of the students.

This year also marks the second annual Brain Art Competition, open to all high school students in the province. Students are asked to recreate the brain in any context – for example, a brain sleeping or composing a great symphony, a brain on drugs or a brain of the future. It can be anatomically correct or abstract. Entries are limited to two-dimensional hand-drawn art, created with any material such as paint or ink, except materials that easily fall or rub off, such as chalk. Submissions must be received by 5 p.m. Thursday, March 11, and judging will be carried out by a three-member panel of artists and scientists. First, second and third cash prizes will be awarded at the ceremony immediately following the Brain Storm Competition on Thursday, March 18. All entries will receive written comments, a certificate of merit and will remain on exhibit in the Health Sciences Centre.

For further information contact Margaret Miller at 777-8289 or mmiller@mun.ca.

However Blow the Winds
Another major literary project which boasts of the connection between Newfoundland and Labrador and Ireland will soon be released to the Newfoundland public. However Blow the Winds: An Anthology of Poetry and Song from Newfoundland and Labrador and Ireland is the companion piece to The Backyards of Heaven, a collection of Irish and Newfoundland poetry which was launched last year with much success in Corner Brook, St. John’s, Waterford City, Cork, Galway, Dublin and Belfast.

However Blow the Winds is over 600 pages and includes not only notable voices such as Nobel-Prize winner Seamus Heaney, recent Pulitzer-Prize winner Paul Muldoon, Winterset-award winner and last year’s Giller Nominee Michael Crummey, former Governor General Award-winner Michel Savard and this year’s Winterset nominee Mary Dalton but also traditional ballads and songs from both countries.

Co-published by Scop Productions Inc. and the Centre for Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, School of Humanities, Waterford Institute of Technology, However Blow the Winds is edited by Dr. John Ennis, head of the School of Humanities, WIT, Dr. Stephanie McKenzie, CEO of Scop Productions and cultural organizer of the Centre for Newfoundland and Labrador Studies at WIT, and Dr. Randall Maggs, lecturer of Newfoundland literature at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University.

The book’s first launch will take place at The Ship Inn, St. John’s at 3 p.m., Wednesday, March 10; in Gander at 5 p.m. at the Irving West Hotel; and in Corner Brook at Casual Jack’s Roadhouse at 3:00 on March 12, Friday.

Guide to university records available
An award-winning guide to the maintenance of university records, produced by the Conference of Rectors and Principals of Quebec Universities (CREPUQ), is now available for the first time in English.

The Recueil des règles de conservation des documents des établissements universitaires québécois, first published in 2002, is now available under the title, Records Retention Schedules for Quebec Academic Institutions. The guide was translated through the financial assistance and collaboration of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada.

While the guide was produced specifically for Quebec universities, both AUCC and CREPUQ believe it will be equally of interest to archivists and records managers at English-language universities outside Quebec. The document includes 300 retention rules for records falling under nine broad categories or fields of university management and activities: administration, human resources, financial resources, real property and moveable assets, student affairs, community services, teaching, research and development, and information and communications.

CREPUQ received the 2002-03 Organization Award from the Association des archivistes du Québec for the Recueil and the major contribution it has made to “the development of archival sciences in Quebec, elsewhere in Canada and around the world.”

The Quebec Schedules is available at www.crepuq.qc.ca/documents/arch/Schedules/default.htm.

CREPUQ is a not-for-profit, voluntary organization of the universities of Quebec. AUCC is the national organization representing Canada’s 93 public and private not-for-profit university and university-degree level colleges.