SunGard and Blackboard have largely kept out of each other's turf, with Blackboard dominating the market for course-management systems and SunGard focusing on administrative software for student records and other tasks.

Now SunGard is crossing that line. For the first time, the administrative software company will directly sell a course-management system to colleges and universities.

SunGard is making the play through a deal with rSmart, a for-profit company that packages, supports, and hosts freely available software that has been produced through a collaborative "open source" process. Under the partnership, SunGard will sell subscriptions to rSmart's version of Sakai, an open-source course-management system developed by universities.

The arrangement puts SunGard's muscle behind that project at a time when a growing number of colleges are considering open-source systems. SunGard...

If you're serious about thoroughbred racing, you know the Daily Racing Form, the newspaper that has been "America's turf authority" since 1894. With the help of the library staff at the University of Kentucky, 132,000 pages of the paper—some 531,000 articles—have been digitized and posted online. The articles date from the 1890s, when the paper was founded, up through the 1990s. The selection represents each decade's racing highlights, including Triple Crown coverage and reports on the careers of Seabiscuit, Secretariat, and the other great horses of the past hundred years.

The Daily Racing Form archive is a recent addition to the Kentuckiana Digital Library, a continuing project that provides access to digital archives of material particular to the state. "Nothing says Kentucky like thoroughbred racing, unless it's bourbon," says Mary Molinaro, associate dean for library...

A new Web site, Open Educational Resources Center for California, brings together information on free and open textbooks and course materials in one location. Though the Web site was designed for California's community-college faculty members, it could be a useful resource for anyone trying to find learning materials in the public domain.

California Assembly Bill 2261, which was signed into law in the fall of 2008, authorized the center as a statewide pilot program for California's 112 community colleges "to provide faculty and staff from community-college districts around the state with the information, methods, and instructional materials to establish open education resource centers." The center is managed by Foothill College, in Los Altos Hills, Calif.

The center was designed to give California's community-college professors and deans "a way to save time and frustration by pulling...

When customers visit Amazon.com, the Web site lets them sample parts of books for free. Some open-education advocates think this try-it-before-you-buy-it idea offers an answer to one of the biggest questions facing the movement to publish course materials free online: What business model can support giving away your content?

New research takes a close look at what happened when one institution, Brigham Young University, experimented with granting free access to the content of some of its distance-education courses. The study examined the cost of opening up those materials and the impact their publication had on paid enrollments, a concern for institutions worried that giving away free courses could cannibalize their ranks of paying students.

The data suggest they needn’t worry. Opening the courses “provided neither a large positive marketing effect that boosted enrollments nor a large...

The open-access journal Innovate, published by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University, is ceasing publication, Stephen Downes announced on his blog and a university spokesperson confirmed.

The peer-reviewed online journal focused on how information technology could be used to enhance academic, governmental, and business settings. It was started in 2004 by James L. Morrison, professor emeritus of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and had 76,282 subscribers from 271 countries.

In its last issue, Innovate had stories about creating learning environments in Second Life, approaches to develop quality assurance in online education, and a virtual learning space that allowed for three-dimensional representations of important archaeological sites.

WASHINGTON, D.C. Public access to research is "inevitable," but it will be a slog to get to it. That was the takeaway message of a panel on the role libraries can play in supporting current and future public-access moves. The panel was part of the program at the membership meeting of the Association of Research Libraries, held here yesterday and today.

"I now believe that having public access to most scholarly communications is inevitable," said David Shulenburger, vice president for academic affairs at the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. "Faculty are coming to understand, finally, that this has to happen if they're going to have the most scholarly opportunities to get things done."

Still, many scholars need the hard sell from colleagues and librarians about the benefits of open access. Lorraine J. Haricombe, dean of the University of Kansas Libraries, described the ...

In an effort to support alternatives to traditional scholarly publishing, five major research universities announced their joint commitment to open-access journals on Monday.

The institutions—Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley—signed a compact agreeing to the “timely establishment” of mechanisms for providing financial support for free open-access journals.

While conventional journals require institutions to pay subscription fees to access articles, open-access publications make their material free to the public, thus aiding libraries forced to cut back during difficult financial times, officials at the universities believe.

John M. Saylor, associate university librarian for scholarly resources and special collections at Cornell, says it is a much healthier research...

The Utah State University OpenCourseWare project has shut down because it ran out of money, according to its former director, making it perhaps the biggest venture to close in the burgeoning movement to freely publish course materials online.

The project published a mix of digital content -- lecture notes, syllabi, audio and video recordings -- from more than 80 courses before its demise. Its aspiration had been to open up access to materials from every Utah State University course, said Marion R. Jensen, the former director.

Instead, Mr. Jensen was laid off on June 30. And, while the Utah OpenCourseWare Web site remains up for now, it no longer has any dedicated staff and is no longer adding new courses.
 
David Wiley, an associate professor at Brigham Young University and an open-education leader, characterized Utah’s open-course collection as apparently the second-largest in the country, ...

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 two-dimensional game will show an image, and players will have to enter words that...

The Internet has proved itself to be a democratizing force for a range of human endeavors, such as the simple act of selling a car or the complex task of shaming a repressive government. Could it also be leveling the playing field in scientific research?

A study led by Waverly W. Ding, an assistant professor of business at the University of California at Berkeley, suggests that it is.

For their research, Ms. Ding and colleagues at Georgia State University and the University of Missouri at St. Louis compared user data involving Bitnet, an Internet forerunner established by Yale University and the City University of New York, and the Domain Name System, which is the naming protocol currently used to identify addresses on the Internet.

Their findings, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, are based on a random sample of 3,771 life scientists from 430 U.S. institutions over a 2...