May 8, 2013, 3:52 pm
By Jake New
The University of California at Berkeley has reached a settlement with Disability Rights Advocates in what the group is calling a “landmark agreement” to improve access to textbooks, course readers, and library materials for students with print-related disabilities.
Disability Rights Advocates represented three Berkeley students who said they had difficulty getting access to the materials they needed for class. The group, which is a nonprofit disability-rights legal center, approached the university last year on behalf of the students, proposing settlement negotiations that could resolve the issues and avoid a lawsuit. The negotiations, which took more than a year, led to several new accommodations, said Paul Hippolitus, director of the university’s Disabled Students Program, who called them overdue.
Over the past four years, the program struggled to keep up with a 115-percent…
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April 23, 2013, 5:00 am
By Jeffrey R. Young
The Smithsonian Institution has signed a deal with Internet2 that could make it easier for colleges to connect with digital content in museums on the National Mall.
The new partnership, to be formally announced this morning at Internet2′s member meeting, will also bring high-speed Internet connections to some of the Smithsonian’s 19 museums and a technology-demonstration area in the institution’s Arts and Industry Building, which is currently being renovated. Internet2 is a nonprofit group that provides superfast network connections to some 220 college and university members.
Some individual colleges have already traded digital content with the Smithsonian. But the new partnership will make it easier for other colleges to do so as well without having to negotiate separate agreements with the cultural institution.
Shelton Waggener, senior vice president of Internet2, said in an…
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March 29, 2013, 5:04 pm
By Jake New
The Society for Scholarly Publishing has removed two blog posts about a legal battle between a scholarly publisher and a librarian after a lawyer representing the publisher threatened to sue the society.
The posts were written by Rick Anderson, a librarian at the University of Utah, for The Scholarly Kitchen, a blog published by the society, which is a nonprofit organization of publishers, printers, librarians, and editors. In the posts, Mr. Anderson discussed a lawsuit filed by Edwin Mellen Press against Dale Askey, a librarian at McMaster University, in Ontario, and against the university itself.
Mr. Askey and McMaster were sued for more than $3-million by the press after the librarian wrote a blog post criticizing the publisher in 2010. The press dropped the lawsuit in early March. A separate lawsuit, filed by the press’s founder, Herbert Richardson, against Mr. Askey,…
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March 26, 2013, 4:56 am
By Jake New
[Updated (3/27/2013, 12:46 p.m.) with reaction from Taylor & Francis Group.]
The editor and the entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration have resigned in response to a conflict with the journal’s publisher over an author agreement that they say is “too restrictive and out of step with the expectations of authors.”
The licensing terms set by the publisher, Taylor & Francis Group, were scaring away potential authors, the editor who resigned, Damon Jaggars, told The Chronicle.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, Tracy Roberts, the editorial director of journals at Taylor & Francis, defended the journal’s policies. “The current publishing environment around licensing and author rights is continually evolving. We consider ourselves to be a forward-looking Publisher on author rights,” Ms. Roberts said. “Our License grants significant reuse rights to authors …
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March 25, 2013, 2:28 pm
By Jennifer Howard
Philadelphia — A lot of the discussion about massive open online courses has revolved around students and professors. What role can academic librarians play in the phenomenon, and what extra responsibilities do MOOCs create for them?
At a conference held here at the University of Pennsylvania last week, librarians talked about the chances and challenges that open online courses throw their way. The conference, “MOOCs and Libraries: Massive Opportunity or Overwhelming Challenge?,” was organized by OCLC, a library cooperative that runs the WorldCat online catalog and provides other services and library-related research.
Lynne O’Brien, director of academic technology and instructional services at Duke University, said the “rapid uptake” of MOOCs had taken many people by surprise. As she put it, “These courses don’t seem to fit anything of the model that we have for how to do…
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March 5, 2013, 3:20 pm
By Jennifer Howard
Daniel J. Cohen (Berkman Center for Internet & Society)
The long-planned Digital Public Library of America is set to make its public debut on schedule next month, with a two-day series of events, to be held April 18-19 at the Boston Public Library, and a new, high-profile leader at the helm. The DPLA announced on Tuesday that Daniel J. Cohen, a leading digital-humanities scholar, will be the project’s founding executive director.
Mr. Cohen comes to the project from George Mason University, where he directs the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. In the announcement, John Palfrey, president of the DPLA’s Board of Directors, praised Mr. Cohen’s contributions to libraries and digital scholarship.
“He has led major open-source development projects, helped to digitize important works of culture,…
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March 4, 2013, 3:03 pm
By Jake New
[Updated (3/4/2013, 5:11 p.m.) with reaction from McMaster University and from Dale Askey.]
Edwin Mellen Press said on Monday that it would drop a lawsuit against a university librarian whom it had sued for writing a blog post critical of the publisher. Critics have called the lawsuit an attack on academic freedom.
The press had sued Dale Askey, a librarian at McMaster University, in Ontario, and the Canadian university in the Ontario Superior Court, seeking more than $3-million in damages for the post, in which Mr. Askey referred to the publisher as “dubious” and said its books were often works of “second-class scholarship.”
In a separate action, the press’s founder, Herbert W. Richardson, sued Mr. Askey for $1-million for personal remarks made in the blog’s comment section. It is not clear whether that lawsuit will also be dropped.
News of the lawsuits sparked a…
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February 8, 2013, 3:00 pm
By Jake New
In September 2010, Dale Askey, now a librarian at McMaster University, in Ontario, published a blog post titled “The Curious Case of Edwin Mellen Press,” in which he called the Edwin Mellen Press “a dubious publisher.” For a few months afterward, several people chimed in in the blog’s comments section, some agreeing with Mr. Askey, some arguing in support of the American publisher.
In June 2012, Edwin Mellen Press’s founder, Herbert Richardson, issued a notice of action to Mr. Askey, suing him for more than $1-million. That same day, the press issued a similar notice of action to Mr. Askey and McMaster University, telling them that they were being sued for libel and seeking damages of $3-million.
The lawsuit, filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, came to light this week when Leslie Green, a philosophy-of-law professor at the University of Oxford, mentioned the…
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January 17, 2013, 9:01 pm
By Jake New
There was a time when professors, scholars, and even one of Wikipedia’s founders, Jimmy Wales, said the user-edited online encyclopedia should not be used in academe. But in recent years, academics seem to be looking more favorably on the popular reference tool.
The newest indication: The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, is now the first presidential library in the United States to have a “Wikipedian in residence” on its staff.
Michael Barera, a master’s student in Michigan’s School of Information, has been selected for the new internship position and charged with increasing and enhancing the library’s presence on Wikipedia.
“Wikipedia is a completely new outreach venue for us,” Bettina Cousineau, exhibit specialist at the Ford Library and Museum, said in a news release. “Not everyone can visit our museum and library in person,…
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January 14, 2013, 12:07 pm
By Jake New
The new vending machine in Drexel University’s main library doesn’t dispense soda or study-time snacks. In fact, those snacks should be kept away from what this machine delivers, to keep crumbs from getting in the keyboards.
This kiosk lends out 15-inch MacBooks free, with the swipe of a Drexel ID card.
When the library started staying open 24 hours a day during midterms, in 2012, a student-government representative noticed a potential problem.
“From a safety standpoint, students carrying expensive laptops, especially at night, is not a good idea,” said the student leader, Omer I. Hashmi. The library has long lent laptops at a desk the old-fashioned way—having people sign them in and out. But staff members were not always available to check the equipment out during the late shift. So Mr. Hashmi, who has since graduated, approached the library last year with his safety…
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