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Google has a new site called Google Search Education with different lesson plans for picking the right search terms, understanding search results, narrowing a search, and evaluating credibility of sources.

Logan College of Chiropractic University has finally released how much the president and his family are paid. If you remember, several months back, another Chronicle article mentioned hints of nepotism. What's totally outrageous is that the president at Logan is the 2nd highest paid president in MO, with only Wash U being higher paid. I have concerns over the impact this can make on Logan as a whole.

Discusses the state of the humanities in education (secondary and higher). Although the article is about three years old, I find a great deal of relevance here. Slouka discusses the commodifcation of education, how America's educational system is being altered to provide "product" for business, rather than critically thinking citizens.

This article looks at a legal but somewhat controversial practice in some municipalities where employees can retire and receive a full pension, but still come back to work full time on a salary. In the case in question a librarian who retired 8 years ago was hired over 66 other candidates at a salary $22,000 higher than an an entry level hire would be paid. Some concerns are also raised about how retire/rehire may prevent young educators from getting jobs.

"The consequences many libraries have feared-loud objections from faculty members and financial penalties from publishers-have not come to pass."

An interesting project that intends to combine Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine (STEM) with Art to make STEAM and thus make these programs accessible to more students. While it has practical use at the pre-school and elementary level I can't see much use it would be for higher levels of education.

Textbook prices have increased several times more than inflation, and it's been an issue for years about new textbooks being required every year with little or no difference. This initiative is largely happening from university bookstores that are trying to stem costs by letting students rent textbooks for large enrollment classes. While a good idea, it seems to only be fighting a flood of costs, in particular as publishers move to electronic textbooks that have the access controlled by them.

Stephen Duncombe, a professor at New York University, has created a free, online version of Thomas More's Utopia that anyone can browse and annotate. The project is called Open Utopia (http://theopenutopia.org/).

"What words and images do we use internally to articulate why our library exists? What moods, feelings, and energy do we want to project outward?"

Very interesting article!

Scholr.ly looks like a very interesting tool. They describe it as "Making Academic Search Social". Here is a description of the search engine: "Undergraduate physicists and comparative literature postdocs have very different search needs. We're building an academic search engine that takes these individual differences into account. The more we know about what you do, the better we can tailor our results to fit your needs. Sometimes, though, it's good to look at a problem from another perspective. Maybe you're doing research in an area you aren't familiar with and want an insider's view. Maybe you're doing interdisciplinary work, or want to better understand your colleague's work. To address these cases, Scholr.ly offers you the opportunity to search as another author- literally. You can search as your professor, a famous linguist, or the highly cited scholar in the department next door- and get the same results they would." It's a very interesting idea...

I wonder if any MOBIUS members will be interested in participating in this pilot project.

It's never been easier to keep track of all the books you're never going to read.

The Digital Public Library of America initiative received $1 million to support the creation of the infrastructure for a national open-access digital library.