Even though it’s the big colleges that typically have the largest budgets and facilities, several universities are teaming up with their local public libraries to bring better service to patrons. At the American Library Association’s annual conference this week, a session titled “Our Town, Common Ground” highlighted some of those partnerships.

According to Library Journal, Cameron University, in Lawton, Okla. calls its local public library “The Little Library That Could.” Faculty members from the university present research at the library, and since both institutions have seen their budgets shrink in recent years, they share grant funds.

And the Journal compares the relationship between Lorain County Community...

After business hours last Thursday night, an e-mail message popped into the in boxes of 800 people at North Carolina State University with the subject line “Mandatory Security Update: July 2009.” The e-mail message, which claimed to be from the IT Help Desk, said that in an effort to block spam, all e-mail users had to click a link to the university’s e-mail sign-in page and enter their user name and password.

It seemed perfectly normal — the image icons were the same, and links to the home page and directory all looked fine.

But it was all a hoax.

Tim Gurganus, IT security officer for the university, said that “phishers,” or people who send messages to trick people into giving out passwords or other personal information, were to blame. In the past, he...

It was a week before his graduation from Pennsylvania State University, and John Pereca was getting anxious that he didn’t have any prospective jobs lined up.

That’s when he decided to auction off an interview with himself on eBay. He promoted his auction on Twitter, in an effort to increase Web traffic.

“The career services [at Penn State] were helpful,” Mr. Pereca said, “but they were a lot more helpful for someone looking for a job in Pittsburgh or a job in Philadelphia, but not for someone who’s looking for work in New York City,” closer to his home on Long Island, N.Y.

As a finance major, Mr. Pereca had taken a course in marketing and knew that if he wanted to stand out to a potential employer, he would need to differentiate himself from the crowd. So he took out a...

David Crane wants to get people all over the world to argue.

This August, Mr. Crane is using his Web site, Debatewise, to sponsor an online debating competition with teams competing from around the globe.

“The idea, really, is to try to make this as international a competition as possible,” Mr. Crane says, “to see if debate can be used as a way of bridging gaps between countries and cultures and to see if we can use — what seems ironic — the method of disagreeing with somebody else as a way of actually finding out how much we’ve got in common.”

His idea has already generated interest. Thirty teams have signed up for the competition from 14 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America. Entry costs $5.

In...

While many colleges across the country have begun thinking of new ways to prevent students’ pirating of music files, a new study out of England suggests that colleges may have less download activity to police.

Survey results released Monday by the British research companies Music Ally and the Leading Question show that more people are listening to music online legally instead of downloading it illegally.

According to the survey of 1,000 music fans, the ratio of music tracks obtained illegally to those gotten legally has decreased from 4-to-1 in December 2007 to 2-to-1 in January 2009, with many more listeners using Web sites like YouTube and MySpace to listen to “streamed” music.

The...

Does tweeting a science conference make you a journalist? And what if a scientist tells you his presentation is “off the record?” Too bad, an editorial in Nature, the international weekly journal of science, says.

A few weeks ago, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York said it would require scientists who blog to ask permission before blogging about a presentation, just like reporters do for those events. But Nature says not only is that a bad idea, but it should just be disregarded.

“Anyone who’s heard the chime of a digital camera starting up in the middle of a session knows that clear, sometimes quite threatening, restrictions on photography are regularly...

A federal judge has threatened to sanction a professor at Harvard Law School for defying orders not to post recordings of court proceedings online.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner ordered the professor, Charles R. Nesson, to explain his “blatant disregard” by posting the material on the Web site of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society – which Mr. Nesson founded – and on Twitter. Judge Gertner gave Mr. Nesson until Thursday to defend his actions and try to avoid fines, Wired magazine reports. Audio clips were still available on the Web site on Wednesday.

“Both orders made clear that deposition recordings, while permitted...

While textbook-rental companies have been around for a few years, it seems they have been growing in popularity with each college semester.

Chegg is one of these companies. A company officer said that the company took in more than $10-million in revenue in 2008, The New York Times reported, and that Chegg took in as much this past January alone.

When the company began, it billed itself as “the Netflix for college textbooks.” Textbooks are mailed to students for a 125-day period, with the option to purchase the book. Comparing the amount spent on rentals to a book’s listed sale price, the company’s Web site says Chegg has saved students more than $40-million, or...

The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind are suing Arizona State University for its use of the Amazon Kindle to distribute electronic textbooks to students, saying the device cannot be used by blind students.

The groups say the Kindle has text-to-speech technology that reads books aloud to blind students, but that the device’s menus do not offer a way for blind students to purchase books, select a book to read, or even to activate the text-to-speech feature, according to a joint statement by the two groups.

In a lawsuit filed last week, a journalism student was also named as a plaintiff.

“While my peers will have instant access to their course materials in electronic form, I will still have to wait weeks or months for accessible...

The University of Kansas will make more of its faculty research free to the public online.

“The University of Kansas has been interested in reforming what has been kind of a dysfunctional system of scholarly communication for years,” said Ada Emmett, an associate librarian at the university. “People fundamentally agree with providing the widest possible access to our scholarship.”

The university already has over 4,400 articles in its digital repository of scholarly work, ScholarWorks, which was opened in 2005. Any new research will be added to that collection, and Ms. Emmett estimated that anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 articles are published by the university each year. She will oversee a task force to administer the program. The plan has not yet been finalized, but she hopes it will be in...