While music-recording companies have been fighting people who illegally share songs, book publishers are looking to expand file-sharing for college students with print-related disabilities.

AccessText, a new service that rolled out a beta version this week, has created an online database that makes it simpler for disability-student services at colleges to track down alternative forms of course materials from book publishers. When electronic versions don't exist for a particular book, the college would get permission to scan the pages so a student could either make the font larger, or use other text-to-speech or refreshable Braille reading devices.

Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education at the Association of American Publishers, says the new...

Administrators at Abilene Christian University say they have a vision to use iPhones, which allow Web access in the palm of users’ hands, to revolutionize campus life. But is giving away the devices to all incoming freshmen the best way to spur innovation? A look at past technology giveaways at other campuses suggests that it might not be, as I note in a Chronicle article this week (free to all, even nonsubscribers).

What do you think? Will more colleges follow Abilene Christian’s lead (and that of Oklahoma Christian University, which is also giving away iPhones)? Should colleges do this? —Jeffrey R. Young

The bulk of the more than 10,000 librarians attending the midwinter conference of the American Library Association in Philadelphia over the past four days have packed up and gone home. But some committed ALA members were still around this morning. About half a dozen of them—on the Committee on Status of Women in Librarianship—gathered to discuss gender-equity and other issues affecting librarians. One issue the librarians discussed was pay. They want the ALA to allow job advertisements in the group’s American Libraries magazine and other publications only if the postings include minimum and maximum pay offered. The librarians said it’s difficult for their colleagues to negotiate with employers for higher salaries without this information.

But many employers, particularly academic institutions, refuse to include this information in their...

Beware of faculty members who are clueless about whether they hold the copyrights to their research papers, Trisha Davis, a librarian at Ohio State University, told a group of librarians today at the midwinter conference of the American Library Association.

She made the remark while discussing the challenges Ohio State faced in building an institutional repository. The university has over 21,000 articles — including conference papers, teaching materials, photographs, and multimedia works — in the archive.

Faculty members will submit research papers to the repository often unaware that they have signed away the rights to their work to a journal publisher, Ms. Davis said. “They are stunned that they have not retained the copyrights,” she said. “They’re vehemently adamant” that they...

Sure, librarians read a lot. But many aspire to be authors, too. At a discussion Saturday morning during the midwinter American Library Association conference, young librarians and those still in library school were offered tips from their colleagues on how to get published. Here are some of the recommendations:

Librarians at for-profit academic institutions are serving notice: They’re real librarians and they’re tired of being ignored. A group for librarians who work at for-profit institutions recently formed within the Association of College & Research Libraries, and members gathered Sunday morning at the midwinter conference of the American Library Association to share their concerns.

One problem the librarians have is that state library consortia exclude their institutions from membership. The librarians say that’s unfair, especially since their students — as state taxpayers — help to pay for these consortia. In addition, many libraries at trade schools and other for-profit institutions have unusual collections, in areas like cooking or art, that could be shared more broadly if the institutions were members of consortia.

Another...

Librarians were introduced Sunday to two candidates vying for the presidency of the Association of College and Research Libraries: Lori Goetsch, dean of libraries at Kansas State University, and Janice Simmons-Welburn, dean of university libraries at Marquette University.

The candidates answered questions from their colleagues at a luncheon during the midwinter conference of the American Library Association. Both women said that the organization they hope to lead had served them well in their careers, and that they wanted to make it more responsive to members’ needs.

Where the two differed was on emphasis. Ms. Goetsch focused on workforce issues for librarians. Ms. Simmons-Welburn concentrated on the organization’s role as an advocate for...

Many librarians attending the American Library Association conference have been sharing their frustrations about how challenging it is to get students and faculty members to take advantage of their libraries’ resources or their own expertise as librarians. On Saturday, Richard T. Sweeney, university librarian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, recommended today that his colleagues consider exploiting YouTube.

Mr. Sweeney, who frequently speaks about how academe needs to adjust to impatient Millennials, suggested providing students with cameras and having them produce videos about libraries that can be uploaded to the video-sharing site. “It’s an opportunity to create buzz” around the library, said Mr. Sweeney. He said Millennials watch YouTube videos as...

Librarians, as a whole, tend to be politically and socially progressive, so it’s no surprise that a group of librarians—the Task Force on the Environment of the Social Responsibilities Round Table—is encouraging their colleagues at the midwinter conference of the American Library Association to be environmentally responsible and use mugs or re-usable water bottles in place of paper or Styrofoam cups. The goal is to reduce waste.

The task force is calling its campaign “Cup by Cup for a Greener ALA.” If every person attending the conference uses coffee cups, the group says, “more than 10,000 paper or Styrofoam cups would not enter already overflowing landfills.”

The campaign doesn’t appear to have caught on, though. This conference-goer has seen lots of people drinking coffee from paper and Styrofoam cups during...

For those who are skeptical that blogs can really change the face of publishing and scholarship, consider the case of Reed A. Cartwright. A postdoctoral geneticist at the University of Georgia, Mr. Cartwright posted his random thoughts on a mutant plant gene on his blog in March 2005.

Six months later a plant geneticist at the University California at Davis contacted Mr. Cartwright after reading his post. The California researcher said that he had coincidentally arrived at the same hypothesis offered by Mr. Cartwright, and that he was about to publish his research in Plant Cell. The plant geneticist said he felt obligated to acknowledge Mr. Cartwright’s blog post and offered to make him a co-author of his article. Mr. Cartwright, who is not a...