A $12.2-million federal stimulus grant from the National Institutes of Health will finance a network some are calling a Facebook for scientists.

Several universities, including Cornell University and the University of Florida, will develop the network over the next two years in the hopes of helping scientists find other academics to work with.

If a researcher is looking for someone else in a very specialized field, he or she would usually think of all the people he has met or simply scan recent scientific journals for names, said Michael Conlon, interim director of biomedical informatics at the College of Medicine at the University of Florida and the principal investigator on the grant. Mr. Conlon calls those methods "haphazard."

People using the network will be able to enter targeted inquiries into a search box. The results will show scholars in very...

The Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group, has created a system for helping people find digital books on the Internet. The service, called BookServer, collects information on digital books that are available online, either free or for a fee. Those in charge of the project say they hope it will make it easier for people to use digital material online.

Authors, publishers, libraries, and book sellers -- in other words, anyone who offers free or paid books online -- can index their materials so they appear when people conduct a search on BookServer.

"This is a mechanism by which we can expose the books that are available for lending," said Peter Brantley, director of the BookServer project at the Internet Archive. "We're trying to get books into the hands of readers as many different ways as...

Catalogs are the problem!

Librarians are the problem!

Students are the problem!

A new Chronicle article on trends in library catalog software has touched off an online reader debate about who's to blame for patrons' search frustrations and how to fix the situation. The article discussed how libraries are trying to out-Google Google with easy-to-use, online catalog-search software, while “pockets of resistance” in library circles feel the new products dumb down the research process.

That resistance was on display in reader gripes like this:

“Unfortunately, instead of teaching students how to conduct a precise search with few relevant results, faculty and librarians have found an easy way out -- googlize everything.”

Search giant Google Inc. announced today that it has purchased reCaptcha, a company that began as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University. ReCaptcha develops online word puzzles to serve both as Web-site security and to help digitize printed text, and Google says it will use it in projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search.

The Carnegie Mellon researchers began their reCaptcha project in 2007 in the hope of killing two birds with one stone. The method takes the distorted word puzzles aimed at keeping hackers and spambots from logging into Web pages, and turns them into micro-archiving machines.

The project...

Google is touting its growing influence in the area of college e-mail systems. To celebrate the start of a new academic year, the company unveiled a Web site that makes it clear just how widespread its presence is in higher education.

The site features a map that looks like a big game of Risk in which Google owns all the pieces. It shows the 145 colleges that have signed up to have Google Apps Education Edition as their official campus e-mail service.

The Official Google Blog announced the site in honor of the now five million students who have "gone Google" and agreed to use the platform. According to...

Joel Tenenbaum, a graduate student at Boston University, may have lost his historic court case with the Recording Industry Association of America this summer, but he has become a cult hero on several pirate Web sites. And now the RIAA charges that Mr. Tennenbaum is encouraging illegal music downloading by egging on his fans via Twitter.

In July, a federal jury ordered Mr. Tenenbaum to pay $675,000 to record labels for downloading and distributing 30 songs by several artists, including Nirvana, Eminem, and the Beastie Boys. Now, it says Mr. Tenenbaum is encouraging others to illegally download music as well. On Tuesday, it filed for injunctive...

Professor Mary Flanagan wants students to go online and label library archives – for free.

Ms. Flanagan, a digital-humanities professor at Dartmouth College, is creating an Internet-based game in which users create descriptive tags for library images to improve searching through the library's database. Although the program will be tested at the college’s library, Ms. Flanagan says the game will be open source and available for others to download and build upon.

She says the program could save libraries time and money. “It’s costly and time consuming to go in and add keywords,” she says. “If you create a game where people actually are actually getting points for generating metadata, you create a system of motivation and a fun way of doing this kind of stuff that people, it turns out, will do for free.”

The...

The University of Iowa law professor Lea VanderVelde has no problem with her students using Wikipedia. In fact, she hopes others use the information her students have posted in their own research.

Law professors across the country have struggled with how they can use technology in their classes and teaching to their advantage.

Some professors have banned laptops in their classes, saying they can just be a distraction. In California, one group began teaching law courses in virtual reality using Second Life.

When Ms. VanderVelde was preparing to teach a class on employment law last semester, she was trying to think of a new way to teach the complex differences among states’ laws. She decided to divide the states up and give a few to each student to research extensively, and to post their...

An arbitrator says Lakehead University, in Ontario, had the right to switch its campus e-mail service to a free program offered by Google and did not violate the collective agreement with the Lakehead University Faculty Association.

The union objected to the switch because it feared that e-mail messages could be opened by the FBI or CIA under the USA Patriot Act since Google is an American company, subject to that law. The arbitrator acknowledged in his ruling that "the likelihood of such incursions by U.S. authority into a private e-mail system (Lakehead’s own former system) was marginal compared to what might occur in the presence of the Google system." However, he...

Arlington, Va. — At what point does the volume of historical scholarship get in the way of our ability to make sense of history?

At The Chronicle Technology Forum on Monday, Andrew J. Torget, director of the digital scholarship lab at the University of Richmond, argued that we have already exceeded that point. He said that if a person were to read one book a day for the rest of his life, he would not even begin to approach the number of books that Google has already scanned into its database from college libraries. There is just too much information out there.

The current model for teaching and learning is based on a relative scarcity of research and writing, not an excess. With that in mind, Mr. Torget and several others have created a Web site called History Engine to help students around...