Colleges have embraced mobile location-based applications to get current and prospective students engaged with their surroundings—and each other.

Previously just for broadcasting user locations, popular GPS-driven applications like Foursquare, SCVNGR, and Facebook Places are being adapted to add a virtual dimension to everyday student life and campus events like freshman orientations and alumni weekends. Rather than simply viewing static maps on their smartphone screens, students can now join virtual scavenger hunts, access location-specific pictures and video, and win prizes for checking in at campus hotspots.

"Universities in general are more into social media than businesses because social media is such a great community builder," said Christina Dorobek, university specialist at application developer SCVNGR. "It was a market that we thought was really important to reach out to."...

Colleges are increasingly sending out announcements on Twitter, Facebook, and other social-media services, hoping to build a positive buzz about the institution and keep people informed. As the list of departments and officials adopting the services grows, some institutions are building Web sites that aggregate college-related social media in one place.

A Twitter aggregator at North Carolina State University, for instance, features an up-to-the-minute feed of tweets coming from 95 different university Twitter accounts, including from academic departments, alumni associations, and dining halls. "The voice of the university was through all of these separate Twitter accounts," said application developer Jason Austin. "What we did was look at how we could leverage that to promote the university and promote these individual Twitter accounts."

In addition to collecting tweets from across...

The Archiving Social Media conference at George Mason University brought scholars, archivists, and Web developers together on Friday to discuss the preservation of data now whizzing around the Internet on blogs and networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Demand for Web archives has grown as social media has become part of the fabric of social history. At the conference, participants talked about the challenge of documenting social media from a variety of angles, such as copyright, ethics, and how the archives will be used.

"This was really intended as a first conversation," said Tom Scheinfeldt, managing director of George Mason's Center for History and New Media, and a research assistant professor of history at GMU. "We have a better sense of the kind of work that would need to be done."

Mr. Scheinfeldt said the conference was inspired by the impact that social media has had in...

A new Web project out of Indiana University is separating the truth from the "truthy" in political Tweets online.

The project—named "Truthy," after Stephen Colbert's descriptor for misinformation dressed up as fact—mines Twitter to analyze patterns in political discussions and makes the information available online. The software allows visitors to take a closer look at Twitter trends to spot data manipulation by tech-savvy special-interest groups.

"We're trying to study how information propagates online through social networks, blogging, and social media," said Filippo Menczer, associate professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana, who is leading the research. Truthy, he said, attempts to answer the question, "Can we put together our understanding of complex social networks and crowdsourcing to automatically detect the spread of misinformation?"

Through the site's...

The City University of New York is turning to social networking to help foster academic discussion and camaraderie across its 23 campuses with its new Academic Commons site.

The CUNY-only network allows faculty, graduate students, and staff to write and share blogs, join subject groups, and participate in academic discussions. "We're trying to create a kind of online virtual community that is open and organic in its nature," said Academic Commons director Matthew Gold.

Registered members of Academic Commons get their own publicly accessible profile, where they can post information about themselves and link up with friends online. The site also allows users to create and join groups, where they can post to a common message board, share files, and collaborate on wikis. Groups range from open-source publishing and graduate admissions to educational games and New York pizza joints. "It...

University librarians are turning to their patrons for ideas on how to improve library services.

This fall, the new Harvard University Library Lab invited students and faculty and staff members to help enhance the facility's offerings by proposing projects of their own. The lab will pool the proposals—submitted through an online portal—for review by a board of library officials. Once selections are made, the lab will develop the most promising projects with grant money from Arcadia, a London-based charitable fund to protect endangered natural and cultural resources, and with technical support from computer programmers and the library staff.

"The main goal has been to get some grassroots ideas generated and get people excited about contributing to their own efforts," said Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science and faculty director of the Office for Scholarly Communication,...

A few weeks after a handful of colleges gave away iPads to determine the tablet's place in the classroom, students and faculty seem confident that the device has some future in academe.

But they're still not exactly sure where that might be.

At those early-adopter schools, iPads are competing with MacBooks as the students' go-to gadget for note taking and Web surfing. Zach Kramberg, a first-year student at George Fox University, which allowed incoming students to choose between a complimentary iPad or MacBook this fall, said the tablet has become an important tool for recording and organizing lecture notes. He also takes the device with him to the university's dimly lit chapel so he can follow along with an app called iBible. "The iPad's very easy to use once you figure them out," he said.

Still, Mr. Kramberg said the majority of students rely on bound Bibles in chapel and stick to...

A Netflix subscription seems like a no-brainer for an academic library with a limited budget to meet campus demand for audiovisual materials. But as more librarians sign up for its popular mail and streaming-video services, Netflix says library distribution of rented DVD's or streaming video violates its terms of use.

According to Steve Swasey, Netflix' vice president of corporate communications, Netflix does not offer institutional subscriptions. All of its media are meant only for personal consumption. Loaning DVD's out for faculty members to project onscreen in class or allowing students to watch streaming video from a library Netflix account is something the company "frowns upon," Mr. Swasey said.

The company knows that its service is being used by librarians, but so far it has not taken legal action to stop them. "We just don't want to be pursuing libraries," Mr. Swasey said. "We ...

People seem to have their own systems when it comes to keeping the minutiae of everyday life in order—jotting down lists in a Moleskine, tapping reminders into an iPhone, papering cubicles with Post-its, you name it.

While most people pay little attention to the disposable reminders that get them through the day, a group of media scholars with the New Everyday—a blog-journal hybrid set up by the digital scholarly network MediaCommons—has opened up an investigation into how those notes are created and used in contemporary life.

"A note can be anything," said Shannon Mattern, an assistant professor at the New School who has been curating the discussion on note taking. "We were asking, 'What is the category of thought that warrants a note if a note can take on so many different material forms?'"

The investigation, entitled "Notes, Lists, and Everyday Inscriptions," is being hosted online...

With students spending more research time in front of the screen and less in the stacks, librarians at Drexel University are trying a fresh approach to helping new freshmen navigate their resources: "personal librarians."

The Personal Librarian Program assigns each of the university's 2,750 entering freshmen to a librarian. The librarians get in touch with their students before they arrive via snail mail—sending a signed letter and business card—and later meet with students in person for a crash course on the library's offerings. Each of the approximately 20 librarians trained for the program will also work with their students throughout the semester to encourage them to use the resources and help them figure out how to do so.

"Our role is to help coach our students and help them learn the tools and skills needed to become very savvy," said Danuta A. Nitecki, Drexel's dean of libraries...