[PHOTO] "Chinese in McCaul Street"

My December photo of a bilingual English/Chinese street sign for Sullivan off Spadina was taken around the western periphery of downtown Toronto's Chinatown. This pictures, taken on the northwestern corner of McCaul and Dundas Street West, north of the Art Gallery of Ontario and on the same corner as the Village Idiot Pub, was taken on the eastern edge of that neighbourhood.

Back when I asked my readers what the characters on the Sullivan Street sign stood for, the consensus was that the characters on that sign were a phonetic transliteration of "Sullivan". Is that the case for this sign, too? echomyst, jiawen, robertprior?

[URBAN NOTE] "Despite a Rough Political Year, Toronto Public Library Usage Is Up"

Torontoist's Steve Kupferman has a post up there highlighting the Toronto Public Library's annual report. Despite cuts, he summarizes, the system is busier than ever.

* Wi-Fi Use Is Way Up: The Toronto Public Library offers wireless internet in all its branches, and Torontonians are evidently taking advantage. In 2011, TPL recorded 2,526,757 wireless sessions in its branches, up 126.5 per cent from 2010. By a wide margin, that’s the biggest usage jump in any service category. Library staff attribute the increase partly to the prevalence of new mobile devices, which sometimes connect to wireless networks without their owners realizing.
* Workstation Use, Also Up: Library computers had more users than the TPL’s wireless service, with 6,380,037 sessions in 2011, for a 6.5 per cent increase over 2010. Workstation usage numbers have been trending upward since at least 2007.
* Circulation Has Been Climbing Steadily for Five Years: Circulation (that is, the number of materials that were borrowed) at the TPL was 33,252,235 this year, up 2.9 per cent from 2010. And that’s no fluke: every year for at least the past five, circulation has increased by a comparable amount. The biggest growth category was e-books, e-audio, and e-video—though the report says these formats still make up only about 1.6 per cent of all items borrowed.
* Program Attendance, Too: 865,495 people attended library programs in 2011, which is a 9.4 per cent increase over 2010. Interestingly, the number of programs offered increased by 10.8 per cent over 2010: there were more events, and there were more attendees. We can only assume the two things are related.