Professors and students are hungrier than ever to use video in the classroom and in their research, but they still have trouble getting the materials they need. So says a just-released white paper "Video Use and Higher Education: Options for the Future."

The paper pulls together the findings of the Video and Higher Education Project, an anecdotal study on video use in higher education paid for by the Copyright Clearance Center and conducted by Intelligent Television with the help of New York University. The project interviewed 45 faculty members in more than 18 disciplines at 20 institutions, with particular emphasis on NYU.

Carol Mandel, dean of the NYU Libraries, said that the study confirmed what we already knew: how important video has become in teaching and research. She was intrigued, though, "to see the extent of news and documentary media that are being used, and that they're...

A just-released series of case studies takes a close look at 12 digital projects to figure out what sustainability strategies have — and haven’t — worked for them. The report, “Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today,” was prepared by Ithaka S&R, the strategy-and-research division of the Ithaka group, a nonprofit outfit that promotes the use of digital technologies in research and teaching. The new study follows up an Ithaka report released in May 2008, “Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources.”

Analyzing the various projects, the report identified a constellation of factors that help a digital resource succeed. It notes that there is no clear...

The University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Texas at Austin, two longtime participants in Google’s massive book-digitizing project, announced today that they have expanded their agreements with the company. The new deals strengthen the alliance between two big university systems and Google’s Book Search program at a time when it is drawing scrutiny from librarians and federal regulators, among others.

Both universities noted that the new arrangements were made possible by the settlement Google reached last year with authors and publishers who had sued the company for alleged copyright infringement. A federal court is scheduled to hold a fairness hearing on the settlement in October. The Justice Department is investigating whether the agreement violates antitrust regulations.

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Depending on whom you ask, Google’s Book Search book-scanning project lays the foundation for a universal, digitized library or creates a dangerous monopoly on information. The Chronicle sat down with Adam Smith, director of product management at Google, to talk about Book Search, the proposed settlement in the authors-and-publishers lawsuit against it, what it means for academic authors and researchers and so-called orphan works, and fears of a Google monopoly. Listen to a podcast of the conversation. —Jennifer Howard

Billed as “a comprehensive directory of online philosophy articles and books by academic philosophers,” PhilPapers is the brainchild of David Chalmers, a philosopher who directs the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University, and David Bourget, one of Mr. Chalmers’s graduate students. First sustained by ANU, the project now has a two-year grant from Britain’s Joint Information Systems Committee and support from the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London, where Mr. Bourget is a rising postdoc.

Judged by the early numbers, PhilPapers has been a hit. It now has about 5,000 registered users, 60 percent to 70 percent of them graduate students and professors in philosophy, according to Mr. Bourget. Site traffic grew from 23,000 visits in February to 96,000 in May. The Chronicle asked Mr. Bourget for an update on how the experiment has unfolded so far ...

The University of Michigan has expanded its agreement with Google’s Book Search program, the university announced today. The move takes into account the terms of the proposed settlement in the lawsuit brought against Google by the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers, the university said.

Michigan has been one of Google’s leading partners in the Book Search venture. The revamped agreement “opens up the U-M library’s extensive collections of 8 million works to readers and students throughout the United States with free previews, the ability to buy access to the university’s collections online and through subscriptions at other institutions,” according to the statement. It describes the new terms as a boost to Michigan’s efforts to...

About two dozen faculty members and students, clutching signs that read “Don’t Gut the Library” and “Keep our books on campus,” picketed the administration building at Ohio State University yesterday, The Columbus Dispatch and the Associated Press reported. The protesters were upset over the culling of printed materials—275,000 books and other works, they said—from the university’s libraries between 2005 and 2008. Another 55,000 items have been discarded in the past four months, according to the picketers.

“What people here are concerned about is the idea of a research collection, much of which will never be digitalized,” John Burnham, a...

It’s beginning to feel like Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the case in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House that drags on, and on, and on. As speculation grows about the impact that the Google Book Search settlement will have on readers and publishers — will it result in a universal library or a worrisome monopoly? — an actual resolution of the case continues to recede in the distance.

In the latest delay, reported by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the federal judge in charge of the proceedings responded to authors’ pleas by giving them an extra four months to opt out of the settlement. They now have until September to take that step. The judge, Denny Chin, also bumped the date for a final hearing on the...

The federal judge in charge of the Google Book Search settlement has shot down the Internet Archive’s request to join the case, Publishers Weekly reported today. The archive had hoped to take advantage of the copyright-liability protections built into the settlement for its own book-digitizing work, and it still may file an amicus brief by the court’s May 5 deadline for objections and comments, according to the report. —Jennifer Howard

The Internet Archive wants to be part of Google’s settlement with the Authors Guild over the Google Book Search program. In a letter posted on the Web site of the Open Content Alliance, a joint library repository managed by the archive, the group’s lawyers asked the judge in the case for permission to file a motion to join the proceedings as a “party defendant.”

A nonprofit group dedicated to building a digital library of Web sites and “other cultural artifacts in digital form,” the archive is best known for the Wayback Machine, a repository of archived Web sites. Like Google, it has also been scanning books. With a million works in hand from more than 150 libraries, the letter states, “the Archive’s text archive is similar to and competitive with defendant Google’s book search...