You may post your vacation snapshots on Flickr, the photo-sharing site, but the Library of Congress has bigger plans.

This week the library was overwhelmed by the public response after it put 3,100 of the most popular photos from its collection online at Flickr, getting them outside the Washington library walls and into the hands of people who want to use them. (The selected photos have no known copyright restrictions.)

“The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over,” noted the library’s Matt Raymond in the institution’s official blog. “We want people to tag, comment, and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo. ... Many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records...

The phone doctor is in. Microsoft Research, the software company’s laboratory, just awarded $1-million in grants to university researchers to develop the cellphone into a heathcare device. Ten institutions will split the money.

Here are some examples of winning projects: University of Pittsburgh researchers intend to develop a cellphone that doubles as a wearable electrocardiograph. It could produce cardio health reports and automatically detect symptoms associated with heart disease.

New York University faculty members are joining the West Africa AIDS Foundation to create a phone that can track the distribution and consumption of HIV/AIDS drugs in Africa.

University of California at Berkeley scientists plan to turn a cellphone camera into a high-quality microscope. It could help patients without easy access to doctors by sending diagnostic images to those physicians. ...

Accounting and business professors, this one is for you. KPMG, the tax and audit consulting firm, this week opened its Faculty Portal online.

The site is free, if your e-mail address ends in “.edu” and you don’t mind giving KPMG a bunch of contact and professional information in order to register. Once in, professors can get news on accounting practices that they can incorporate into their classroom talks.

They can also get access to the “Ethical Compass,” a tool with scenarios for students that can help illustrate what is good and what is bad. (Helping to set up illegal tax shelters, something that KPMG apologized for doing in 2005, presumably is the type of bad thing that students will be steered away from.) —Josh Fischman

Extending its array of college services, Blackboard, a maker of course-management software, said today it would buy an emergency-notification company, NTI Group Inc., that specializes in sending alerts to educational institutions. The deal was reported by Bloomberg News and several other wire services.

Michael Chasen, CEO of Blackboard, said the deal would cost it $182-million and should be completed by March 31.

Campuses have been paying ever more attention to emergency-notification planning since last spring’s shootings at Virginia Tech and subsequent incidents at Delaware State and Louisiana State Universities. NTI sends mass notifications to people at schools and colleges using text messages and voice mail to cellphones as well as e-mail and other channels. —Josh Fischman

Another year, another set of Social Security numbers possibly stolen from a university.

The University of Georgia is trying to warn more than 4,000 former, current, and future residents of a university housing complex that a hacker got into a computer server containing their personal information, reports the Associated Press.

Between December 29 and 31, the university said yesterday, a hacker with an overseas Internet address got into a server that contained all sorts of sensitive information culled from housing applications.

Colleges are not supposed to use Social Security numbers as identifiers for students and staff, but many can’t seem to wean themselves from the practice, as The Chronicle has recently reported. This was the second breach at the University of Georgia in 11 months, in fact. In February of 2007, a hacker accessed information, including medical files, of a...

Yale University Press is relying on a new piece of software to make its titles more widely available.

The program, CoreSource, interfaces with Microsoft’s Live Search Books program. The idea is that the press will be able to digitize more of its books and potential buyers will be able to find them through Live Search Books. If motivated by the text, users can become buyers through print-on-demand programs. —Josh Fischman

“It’s important for people not to focus on the doggone numbers.” The speaker was not a campaign manager explaining a presidential candidate’s poor showing in Iowa last night. Rather it was U. of Illinois special assistant Chet Gardner, explaining the poor enrollment in the university’s new Global Campus online education project to the Chicago Tribune yesterday.

The doggone numbers showed fewer than 15 students enrolled in the much-anticipated program, which opened its virtual doors on Wednesday. Initial enrollment had been projected at 75, and the multi-million program is supposed to teach more than 9,000 students by 2012.

Mr. Gardner emphasized those goals were still within reach, and the important fact is that the university got the program rolling. It had been delayed by four months while the institution’s Board of Trustees debated over financing and fees, not giving...

As part of a December salvo in its war against illegally downloaded music, the Recording Industry Association of America sent letters to the University of Washington, leveling charges of piracy against 16 students and threatening legal action. But the university is refusing to pass the letters along—for now.

UW isn’t sure the students are to blame, a university spokesman told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer yesterday.

The problem is that the letters actually accuse Internet addresses, and students are only guilty by association with those addresses. In other words, a student’s computer may have connected to the Internet and downloaded a music file using one of the addresses, but that doesn’t mean the student was the person operating the computer at that time. It could have been another student at the controls, or even a...

The money and priority given to science and engineering education in the coming year by Congress and President Bush is woefully inadequate, says the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, whose members include a wide spectrum of scholarly and industry groups ranging from Google to the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges.

The occasion for the slam is the 2008 Omnibus Appropriations bill being considered by Congress, according to a blog post today by the Computing Research Association, a task-force member.

“The President and Congress, for all their stated support this year for making basic research in the physical sciences and engineering a top budget priority, ended up essentially cutting, or flat-funding, key science agencies after accounting for inflation,” reports the blog.

The task force is particularly incensed because earlier this...

Sony Electronics and Indiana University have just signed an agreement giving the university discounts on items like high-definition televisions, and giving the company access to the institution to explore the uses of their technology in the social and professional lives of professors and students.

Indiana gets HD equipment for its public-television station and its school of music, Brad Wheeler, vice president for information technology, told The Chronicle. “But that’s just the start,” he said. “There are opportunities to explore new technologies like 3-D video and animation, and new communication tools for faculty and students.”

Sony is interested in the role that electronics—computers, audio, video—play in social life on the campus. Its interest in user behavior has not always been benign: Sony’s music group was caught this year hiding code on some music CDs to track users’...