Ever wanted to see a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald's copy of the book 1984? Probably not (it looks remarkably like any other copy of the book), but if you ever do, the University of North Texas has made it easy with its new digital catalog of photos from the Dallas Police Department's investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

The Dallas Morning News reports that the university's Digital Projects Unit has put 404 photographs from the investigation on its Portal to Texas History Web site. All the photos had been available to the public on a Web site run by the city of Dallas, but the new site reproduces the images in higher resolution and makes them easier to view.

While most of the photographs are mundane (read: dozens of photos of the exterior and interior of the school book depository from where Oswald fired at JFK, a couple of pictures of Oswald's "Fair Play for Cuba"...

As mobile phones begin functioning more like minicomputers, they also take on more security risks.

That's why the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology recently received a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to work toward developing safer mobile devices and telecommunication networks that serve such devices. The project's researchers hope to protect mobile devices from viruses and malware that can steal personal information.

“Since mobile phones typically lack security features found on desktop computers, such as antivirus software, we need to accept that the mobile devices will ultimately be successfully attacked," said Jonathon Giffin, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science, in a news release. "Therefore our research focus is to develop effective attack-recovery strategies.”

First, the researchers want to find out if...

When it comes to budget cuts in 2009, nothing is sacrosanct, not even information technology.

According to a new report from the Campus Computing Project, IT budgets are being slashed in colleges and universities across the country despite a rising demand for resources and services. The report, which surveyed 500 institutions, found that 48 percent of respondents were facing IT budget cuts for the current academic year, as compared with 30.6 percent last year and just 13.1 percent in 2007. Likewise, the number of institutions with more money for IT was down to only 21.4 percent this year from 49 percent in 2008.

“IT has already gone through serious budget cuts after the dot-com bubble burst,” Kenneth C. Green, founding director of the Campus Computing Project, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. “A second decline is not easy to come back from.”

Mr. Green says the serious budget problem...

Illicit file sharing isn’t just for kids these days. Once mainly used for downloading pirated music, sites have sprung up on the Internet that allow free swapping of academic journals (think Napster’s younger dweeby brother).

A new study, published in the Internet Journal of Medical Informatics, looks at a site aimed specifically at medical professionals and students and finds that thousands of people were obtaining non-open-access materials free of charge. The article says that in a six-month period of watching the unnamed site, nearly 5,500 articles were exchanged, costing journals about $700,000 in that time, or about $1.4-million a year.

The site had 127,626 registered users, who during the study period put in requests for 6,587 journals. There was an 83 percent success rate in finding the article. Nature and Science were the most commonly swapped journals.

The article does not focus on...

By opening the largest online rental service for scientific, technical, and research journals, the company Deep Dyve is hoping to do for academic publications what Netflix has done for movies: make them easily accessible and inexpensive for everyone.

The Web site has been an academic-journal search engine since 2005 and unveiled its rental program this week. Now anyone can “rent” an article—which means you can view it on your computer without ownership rights or printing capabilities—for as little as 99 cents for 24 hours. Users can also subscribe for monthly passes. Currently the site has 30 million articles from various peer-reviewed journals.

William Park, chief executive of Deep Dyve, says the model will not only allow more people to read articles they might otherwise not see, but will actually encourage users to purchase more content from journals. He says that now, only about 0.2...

If the last four years are any indication, college-student e-mail addresses may soon be a thing of the past.

So says a report issued by Educause, a nonprofit dedicated to the advancement of information technology in higher education. The "Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2008 Summary Report" took information from nearly 930 colleges and universities regarding their IT practices and environments.

It found, among other things, that in 2008 nearly 10 percent of associate, baccalaureate, and master’s institutions as well as 25 percent of doctoral institutions were considering putting an end to student e-mail addresses because so many students were already using personal e-mail accounts. That is a large shift from the 1 to 2 percent of institutions that were considering this in 2004.

The survey highlighted findings from IT categories like networking and security, information systems, faculty and...

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.

With the new Microsoft operating system, Windows 7, hitting the shelves tomorrow, there has been a lot of hoopla surrounding the product. But will it help colleges? Microsoft representatives demonstrated the new operating system at The Chronicle's offices to bolster a claim that the new Windows — unlike a previous effort, the much-reviled Vista -- will be a major boon for higher education.

To find out if the product lives up to the hype, The Chronicle spoke with a number of college CIO's and IT project managers who have already tested and, to various degrees, deployed Windows 7. Their conclusion: Microsoft has taken a solid step forward, creating something that could save institutions some money and improve security, and is decidedly not Vista. But at the same time the new OS, in the words of the tech columnist Walter S. Mossberg, of The Wall Street Journal, is “much more of an...

The University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh’s College of Business is creating a new type of e-textbook that will give professors more control of their content while also saving students hundreds of dollars in the process.

The program, a result of a nearly $300,000 grant from U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, will commission professors to create texts personalized for specific classes and put them in a digital format that will bring textbook prices down from their average cost of $100 to a much more moderate $15.

While the idea of money-saving digital textbooks is not new, M. Ryan Haley, an associate professor of economics at the university, sees this program as an opportunity to alter just how these textbooks are created and utilized. Using a “core concepts” paradigm, Mr. Haley will write 80 percent of the first e-textbook in the program—a...

With the Winter Olympics less than five months away, the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic games has become preoccupied with building muscle -- intellectual muscle.

The committee, in collaboration with more than 20 Canadian universities and The Globe and Mail, has created a series of podcasts that provide an academic look at the Olympic Games.

The series will feature professors from institutions like Carleton, Dalhousie, and McGill Universities, discussing topics such as what the games contribute to society, gender stereotypes in sports, the politics of the games, and national identity. At least two podcasts will be featured each week until the start of the Olympics in February. 

“The Vancouver 2010 Winter Games are about celebrating the highest levels of achievement of the `body, mind, and spirit,’” said Burke Taylor, the committee's vice president for...