In response to the recent news that Blackboard plans to buy WebCT, a move that would combine the two largest providers of course-management software, another company in the market, Desire2Learn, issued a statement this week stressing that it has "no intention of merging or selling." It was a not-so-subtle move to play on the uncertainty of customers of both WebCT and Blackboard, who wonder what the merger will mean for the future of the companies’ products. Representatives of WebCT and Blackboard, meanwhile, are holding events this week at Educause to try to reassure their clients that both lines of products will continue to be supported and improved.

This month the Library of Congress awarded a $3-million grant to help finance the development of Portico, a nonprofit service that will archive online scholarly materials. Portico is a project of Ithaka, a nonprofit organization created by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and two other foundations to foster online scholarly activities. The new grant will be used to develop the technical infrastructure and business model for Portico.

Five publishers have filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit against Google because it is scanning books from top research libraries for its Library Project, the Association of American Publishers said on Wednesday. The association is coordinating and paying for the lawsuit. (The Chronicle, subscription required)

Since the spring about 20 states have passed laws that require residents to be notified when companies leak their personal information online. And while the laws are often intended to crack down on commercial data breaches, they’ll also apply to colleges, said Tracy Mitrano, director of information-technology policy at Cornell University, at this year’s Educause conference.

Ms. Mitrano led a wide-ranging roundtable on security and privacy issues that included discussion of the new data-breach laws. The laws, participants agreed, will force computing officials and general counsels to answer some tricky questions, like what constitutes “personal information� and what kind of encrypted data is exempt from the notification requirement.

“We’re asking anybody who’s going to breach our data,â€? joked Ms. Mitrano, “to do it before December 8thâ€?—when New York’s tough...

As more than 30 campus technology officials traded tales from the file-swapping trenches at this year’s Educause conference, one point quickly became clear: Music and movie piracy is alive and well. The general tone of the discussion—moderated by David Futey, the associate director of academic computing at Stanford University—was one of measured, but apparent, exasperation.

Some participants complained that lawmakers and entertainment-industry officials have gone too far in pressuring colleges to sign up for legal file-swapping services like Napster and Cdigix. When colleges sign up with those services, record companies tend to stop sending them complaints about individual copyright infractions, according to one administrator. "Their notifications are stopping even though their peer-to-peer activity remains the same," he said. "That’s why this feels like extortion."

Another campus...

More than 7,500 college administrators and professors have gathered in Orlando this week for the annual conference by Educause, a higher-education technology group, making it one of the largest education-technology gatherings of the year. What are the hot issues this year? Diana G. Oblinger, a vice president for the group, said that the top issue is probably disaster recovery, as colleges try to determine the lessons of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Other top issues: security, e-portfolios and other efforts to assess how well students are learning, and podcasting. Educause is itself jumping into podcasting by making many of the sessions here available to members in a form that can be downloaded to iPods or other digital music players.

High school students in Indiana will be able to transmit electronic copies of their transcripts to colleges to which they are applying for admission, under a statewide program announced earlier this week. State officials said that the change will speed the admissions process. (South Bend Tribune)

Thirty percent of respondents to a survey by the Campus Computing Project point to security as their No. 1 information-technology concern. Many colleges nevertheless lack plans for recovering from security breaches and other problems, the survey found. (The Chronicle, subscription required)

Google’s plan to scan millions of books and put them online is starting to take on an international flair. In late August the search giant announced the opening of searchable book databases in 14 different English-speaking countries. Now the company has unveiled local-language libraries in eight European nations, including France, Germany, and Italy. (The New York Times)

Google officials will discuss the new databases this week at the Frankfurt Book Fair—a bustling gathering of authors and publishers—as part of a panel discussion with Jean-Nöel Jeanneney, president of the French National Library. For more on Mr. Jeanneney, who has accused Google of Anglocentrism, see an article from The Chronicle by Aisha Labi.

John D. Lawson, the chief information officer at Tulane University, garnered a standing ovation from a crowd at the Higher Education Leadership Forum, a two-day event sponsored by The Chronicle and Gartner. His talk covered in detail Tulane’s preparation for Hurricane Katrina and the issues the university dealt with in the aftermath.

Mr. Lawson opened with a picture of the projected path of Hurricane Wilma, and then he started in. His talk was peppered with advice for CIO’s and presidents, and also contained a good deal of true confessions. "We didn’t really understand the scope of the disaster that could hit us," he said. He also admitted that Tulane’s communications plan was not as robust as it should have been. He advised the audience to have a plan to rely on multiple cellphone vendors (he carries three phones) since the lines will likely be clogged. He also told the crowd to...