College network administrators haven’t always been psyched about Skype: The popular program, which lets users make phone calls over the Internet, can be a real bandwidth hog and, arguably, a security threat.

But some professors who teach courses online are growing quite fond of the software, as Tom Regan notes in a column for The Christian Science Monitor. Skype has proved particularly useful in Web-based foreign-language courses because the tool lets students get instant feedback from native speakers. Conversing with live instructors is surely a better way to learn a language than speaking along with CD’s or cassettes, Mr. Regan writes.

Yu-Hsiu Lee, a Chinese instructor at Indiana University at Bloomington, offers more details on Skype’s educational value in a post on Skype Journal. —Brock Read

Robert C. Darnton, the new director of the Harvard University Library, has promised to help the institution “move into the world of digitized information.” The librarian isn’t just talking the talk: As The Harvard Crimson notes, he’s working on an ambitious e-book project of his own.

Mr. Darnton has spent years poring over unpublished letters in an obscure Swiss archive, and he’s now ready to write a book about 18th-century book smuggling across the French border. If all goes as planned, the book will be published digitally, and it will allow each reader to create a personal version of the text, based on his or her interest in reading digitized excerpts of the unpublished messages and other source material.

The librarian hopes to let people print hardbound copies of the book, each of them customized and unique. “The notion of the final fixed copy is giving way,” he says. “Texts are always ...

In an article on yesterday’s file-sharing forum, Ohio University’s student-run newspaper, The Post, sheds some light on the cost of fighting campus piracy. The university, which was once inundated with copyright-infringement claims, hasn’t received any such notices in months. But copyright compliance hasn’t come cheap: Today, the university uses a nearly $60,000 software and hardware package from Audible Magic to stop file sharing on its network and pays about $16,000 for support, maintenance, and regular database updates that allow the system, called CopySense, to detect newly released music.

Campus officials seem satisfied with the investment, and they must certainly be happy that record-company complaints are no longer taking up their time. But how many colleges can afford to devote that much money to an antipiracy tool? —Brock Read

Yet another major college library has paired off with a commercial book-scanning project: Yale University announced yesterday that it would post portions of its collection online through Live Search Books, Microsoft’s digital library.

Yale will start by scanning 100,000 of its English-language books that are out of copyright, according to a news statement.

Microsoft is sparring with two other groups in what has become a crowded book-scanning marketplace. Google’s much-publicized digitization project continues to add libraries to its roster, and the Open Content Alliance — which scans books and allows them to be indexed by any search engine — recently reached a deal to digitize volumes from the Boston Library Consortium. —Brock Read

Earlier this year, Ohio University finished atop the recording industry’s infamous list of institutions receiving the most copyright-infringement notices. But these days the university is singing a much happier tune: Campus officials say a ban on illicit peer-to-peer networking has cut down on piracy without restricting legal file sharing.

Now that it’s no longer perched on top of the industry’s most-wanted list, Ohio seems eager to join the debate over campus song swapping. Yesterday the university played host to a forum — called “P2P File Sharing: A 360° Perspective” — on its Athens campus, and it has posted video of the event online.

The discussion included veterans from both sides of the file-sharing wars, but it devoted considerable time to remarks from several musicians, songwriters, and agents — who argued that music piracy hurts not just platinum-selling artists and record-company ...

Open-access advocates cheered last week when the Senate passed HR 3043, a bill making appropriations for the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services. That’s because the measure included language requiring all researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health to submit their final manuscripts to a free online archive:The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

That language had already made its way into the House’s...

Like most institutional imprints, the Université Libre de Bruxelles has published plenty of books that have long since gone out of print, left to languish in campus libraries and professors’ private collections. Until now, that is: The university is giving those texts second lives by recasting them as open-access e-books.

About 20 books are already available on the press’s Web site, and more are forthcoming.

Not surprisingly, Peter Suber of Open Access News is all for the idea. Presses that are reluctant to offer open-access versions of new books should follow the Brussels university’s lead, he says, to get their feet wet in online publishing. “Creating an open-access edition of an out-of-print book is a small investment with large gains for the author, for readers, and for the press,” he writes.

It seems like a sensible idea. Are many other university imprints heading down the same...

In the months following Hurricane Katrina, many campus computing officials pondered their own ability to deal with disaster: If a natural emergency threatened their entire IT infrastructure, how would they cope?

The wildfires sweeping through southern California forced technology staffers at Pepperdine University to find out, as Computerworld notes: The first warning that Timothy Chester, the CIO of Pepperdine University, had of the wildfire that would threaten the Malibu, Calif., campus came when the power went out in his home. It was 5 a.m. Sunday. Within a matter of hours, brush fires came within 100 feet of the data center — and there was a point, said Mr. Chester, where “we had serious concern that the data center itself was going to be jeopardized.”

Within a few hours of that power outage, Mr. Chester had made it to Pepperdine’s data center, paged other IT officials, shut down key a...

Vinton G. Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, might soon be feeling the pangs of empty-nest syndrome: This week his term as chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will expire, the Associated Press reports.

Mr. Cerf joined the board of ICANN, which regulates domain names and Internet Protocol addresses, in 1999, about a year after the nonprofit group was founded. The organization has generated a good deal of debate since he signed on: Some critics have charged ICANN with being insufficiently transparent, and others have argued that the group should be made more international. In 2005 a number of developing nations fought to replace ICANN with an international consortium, but Mr. Cerf managed to keep the group intact.

Mr. Cerf’s eight years at the head of ICANN might be up, but the computing expert shouldn’t have too much trouble keeping busy. He...

High-school teachers and college professors receive next to no training on copyright law and fair-use doctrine, a new report argues, and their students are suffering as a result.

“The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy,” released by American University’s Center for Social Media, is based on interviews that university researchers conducted with more than 60 media-literacy educators. Those interviews paint a fairly grim portrait of teachers, unsure about the specifics of fair-use doctrine, cowed into avoiding perfectly valid uses of copyrighted material.

“Too many teachers fear they will misinterpret fair use or are simply unaware of its expansive nature,” write the study’s authors, including Peter A. Jaszi, a professor of law who has testified before Congress about fair-use doctrine. Because they are afraid of violating copyright, “teachers use less effective teaching...