Access Conference

Dave Binkley was a systems librarian from the 1980s until his death at the age of 53 from hepatitis in 2005. He was an early participant in the Access Conferences and a remarkable innovator in automated online services in his day. He is best remembered for two things: the Aviso interlibrary loan system and the GODOT article retrieval system. Developed while Dave was working at the University of Waterloo, Aviso was for many years the de facto standard for interlibrary loan management in Canada. Godot was developed while Dave was working at Simon Fraser University and incorporated a citation-resolution system similar to OpenURL, which Herbert Van de Sompel was developing in Ghent at the same time. Dave’s work represented the ideal of libraries taking ownership of their online services, at a time when buying off-the-shelf software and putting up with its limitations was the norm.

After Dave’s death, Gary Gibson of Gibson Library Connections honoured his memory by offering a subsidy to the Access Conference in Dave’s name. The subsidy is used to bring in a speaker who would not ordinarily attend Access: a voice from outside our little circle. As of 2018, the Dave Binkley Memorial Lecture is sponsored by OCLC.

Cynthia Bruce is an Associate Professor of Music Therapy and Chair of the Department of Creative Arts Therapies at Concordia University in Montreal. As a blind activist scholar working at the intersection of Critical Disability Studies, Music Therapy, and education, she works to mobilize lived disability knowledge to expose systemic inequity and formulate more just approaches to research and practice. She focuses on accessibility in higher education and on self-advocacy as essential lived knowledge that can generate deep understandings of inequity and elucidate possibilities for progressive change. Dr. Bruce recently co-led the development of a comprehensive set of recommendations for an accessibility standard in education in Nova Scotia and is a collaborator with the Canadian Accessibility Network. She is a 2022 recipient of the Concordia University Petro Canada Young Innovator Award for her project titled, Locked Down to Teach and Learn: A Critical Disability Studies Analysis of Disabled Student and Faculty Experience in the Age of COVID-19.

Thank you to our sponsor of the Dave Binkley Memorial Lecture, OCLC.

Past Dave Binkley Memorial Lectures: https://accessconference.ca/the-dave-binkley-memorial-lecture/