Group items tagged

"This guest post comes from Daniel Jacobson, Director of Application Development for NPR. Daniel leads NPR's content management solutions, is the creator of the NPR API and is a frequent contributor to the Inside NPR.org blog." As I look at this beautiful flowchart (beautiful in function) of the NPR web publishing process, I wonder what libraries could learn from this method of information management.  This NPR process is designed to get the content out in a variety of ways, with options for the end user. How are libraries and library systems making this possible for our end users? 

"Academic libraries that choose to emphasize services that are relevant in a digital world strike the authors as the most likely to find fertile ground." Academic libraries that choose to emphasize services that are relevant in a digital world strike the authors as the most likely to find fertile ground. They would be entering a realm of many opportunities; a realm characterized by rapid and discontinuous shifts. These institutions would be well advised to begin the process now. The trend-line is clear and the shift to a digital environment has tremendous momentum. Libraries cannot afford to wait until the smoke has cleared and the digital revolution is complete to take action. First the risk of being subordinated to more nimble entities within (and perhaps outside of) the academy is significant. Libraries will be hard pressed to reclaim lost territory once others fulfill these roles successfully. Second, the shift to a predominantly digital environment began more than a decade ago, shows no sign of slowing, and is creating a cascade of associated changes.

This is a code of best practices in fair use devised specifically by and for the academic and research library community. It enhances the ability of librarians to rely on fair use by documenting the considered views of the library community about best practices in fair use, drawn from the actual practices and experience of the library community itself. It identifies eight situations that represent the library community's current consensus about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials and describes a carefully derived consensus within the library community about how those rights should apply in certain recurrent situations.

"Providing nearly 700,000 species, 35 million pages of scanned literature and over 600,000 photos of living creatures, the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) has recently launched a new version of its free online system in response to requests from the general public, citizen scientists, educators and professional biologists around the world for a site that was more engaging, accessible and personal."

May be a great resource for general biological information on species.

One of the main conclusions of this research is that students are outsourcing much of the evaluation process to the search tools themselves, and because of this the search algorithms that drive these tools are functioning to determine what resources students use.  Differences in resource use attributable to differences in the design of the discovery tools' search algorithms could be directly observed in the data collected from students.

"The ultra high-resolution images of works, both famous and less well-known, can be freely downloaded, zoomed in on, shared, added to personal 'studios', or manipulated copyright-free. Users can have prints made of entire works of art or details from them. Other suggestions for the use of images include creating material to upholster furniture or wallpaper, or to decorate a car or an iPad cover for example."

"The DWRL is pleased to share our library of innovative technology-based lesson plans and classroom assignments created by DWRL Instructors. Our new online database features a wide assortment of lesson plans and assignments employing a number of technologies. The lesson plans address a broad spectrum of pedagogical activities-from initial brainstorming to electronic peer review, from interactive visual rhetoric lessons to collaborative multi-media online publications; the site also features lesson plans suitable for time spans as short as a single class and as lengthy as semester-long projects. Also, be sure to visit the DWRL's Blogging Pedagogy site which features an ongoing series of weekly interviews with individual instructors about their technology-based assignments, allowing for a more in-depth and personal look at our featured lesson plans."

This report presents five recommendations for the library profession: 1. Increase librarians' understanding of library value and impact in relation to various dimensions of student learning and success. 2. Articulate and promote the importance of assessment competencies necessary for documenting and communicating library impact on student learning and success. 3. Create professional development opportunities for librarians to learn how to initiate and design assessment that demonstrates the library's contributions to advancing institutional mission and strategic goals. 4. Expand partnerships for assessment activities with higher education constituent groups and related stakeholders. 5. Integrate the use of existing ACRL resources with library value initiatives.

"The NCSU Libraries Mobile Scavenger Hunt is an interactive, technology-rich way to introduce students to the library. Developed in response to student and instructor feedback collected in 2010-2011, it leverages the motivating power of situated learning and the fun of team game dynamics to orient students to the Libraries' spaces, promote the use of emerging technologies, and foster confidence in using the Libraries' collections. The activity is run using iPod Touches and several free apps and online tools. Students answer Scavenger Hunt questions using Evernote, a free app for multimedia note-taking, which is installed on the iPod Touches distributed to the Scavenger Hunt teams. Librarians are able to monitor students' answers in real time as they are entered into Evernote, keeping score on a Google Docs spreadsheet."

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the availability of a draft update of SERU: A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding for public comment (NISO RP-7-201X) through February 19, 2012. SERU offers publishers and libraries the opportunity to save both the time and the costs associated with a negotiated and signed license agreement for e-resources by both content provider and customer agreeing to operate within a framework of shared understanding and good faith. The SERU framework provides a set of common understandings for parties to reference as an alternative to a formal license when conducting business.

In the hurly-burly of digital content innovation and monetization, it's hard to figure out what things are, so we try to find apt comparisons. With the new Next Issue digital newsstand, let's think Netflix or Pandora or Spotify as the closest cousins. Next Issue, the offspring of five prosperous parents (Time Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp.), launched last night what I think will be a model-changing product for publishers.

One way to read: Sign up once - and the new site is offering relatively generous 30-day trials - and you have but one navigation to learn. While the full content from each of the magazines is present, with added video, Next Issue says customers need only learn one way of getting around. If it's an intuitive design, that's a huge plus, as news- and feature-hungry readers find ourselves forced to learn the navigation nuances of each of our favorite apps.

On Thursday, May 31, 2012 the Getty Research Institute (GRI) will launch the Getty Research Portal, an unprecedented resource that will provide universal access to digitized texts in the field of art and architectural history.  The Getty Research Portal is a free online search gateway that aggregates descriptive metadata of digitized art history texts, with links to fully digitized copies that are free to download. Art historians, curators, students, or anyone who is culturally curious can unearth these valuable sources of research without traveling from place to place to browse the stacks of the world's art libraries. There will be no restrictions to use the Getty Research Portal; all anyone needs is access to the internet.

The institution negotiates a deep discount off the list price of the textbook in order to have access to an e-text edition. In return for the discount, the university guarantees that every single student in the course will buy the e-text, which is charged like a lab fee. This is a definite change from the current textbook model, in which each student is personally responsible for showing up to class armed with the textbook, either in printed or digital form. As schools are discovering, as the prices of printed textbooks rise, so does the number of students who avoid buying the textbook. When we made this arrangement, we were considering, what does the publisher need to have, what does the author need to have, and what does the student need to have? You have to create a model, I think, that works out for all three of those pieces.

Hugh McGuire: "The distinction between "the Internet" and "books" is arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now."

ebrary, a ProQuest business and leading provider of e-books and research technology, today announced that the results of its survey of more than 1,000 librarians regarding e-book mobile and offline access is now publicly available online.  Anyone may register to receive the full results along with a paper authored by Dr. Allen McKiel, Dean of Library Services at Western Oregon University, at http://www.tfaforms.com/222151

Steven Bell looks at trends in unaccredited education (OER, for-profit) and postulates on what it might mean for academic libraries. 

In keeping with that spirit, The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has publicly released more than 161,000 digitally scanned historical maps spanning in excess of 130 years and covering the conterminous lower 48 states. This Historical Topographic Map Collection provides a comprehensive repository of the landscape of our Nation and tracks changes through time, providing essential clues critical in the understanding of our Nation's topography, geography and development.  

The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Texas Wesleyan University undertook a project to find out what a classroom would look like if it were designed by faculty and students-and then to build that classroom. The goal was to promote innovation in learning space design and to advance instructors' understanding of how classroom design impacts teaching and learning. Classroom.NEXT initiated a campus-wide dialogue on the design of informal and formal learning spaces, and faculty, students, and administrators identified flexibility and interactivity as key attributes to be promoted in all Texas Wesleyan learning spaces. Collaboration, particularly student-faculty collaboration, was a central component of the success of Classroom.NEXT. Faculty participants commented that they learned as much from their students about learning space design and technology as they did from the research.