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Turn Your Laptop Into an Earthquake Sensor | Comment
Writing Students and Professors Fight to Keep Theses From Being Freely Available Online | Comment [4]
Educause Issues Statement on RIAA's Methods of Catching Music Pirates | Comment
ABC News to Open 5 University News Bureaus | Comment [10]
How a Lawsuit Over Electronic Reserves Could Affect Colleges | Comment [5]
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March 6, 2008
Giving Away Gadgets -- Like iPhones -- May Not Be the Best Way to Spur Innovation
Administrators at Abilene Christian University say they have a vision to use iPhones, which allow Web access in the palm of users’ hands, to revolutionize campus life. But is giving away the devices to all incoming freshmen the best way to spur innovation? A look at past technology giveaways at other campuses suggests that it might not be, as I note in a Chronicle article this week (free to all, even nonsubscribers).
What do you think? Will more colleges follow Abilene Christian’s lead (and that of Oklahoma Christian University, which is also giving away iPhones)? Should colleges do this? —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Thursday March 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [13]January 15, 2008
Librarians Push for Pay Data in Job Postings
The bulk of the more than 10,000 librarians attending the midwinter conference of the American Library Association in Philadelphia over the past four days have packed up and gone home. But some committed ALA members were still around this morning. About half a dozen of them—on the Committee on Status of Women in Librarianship—gathered to discuss gender-equity and other issues affecting librarians. One issue the librarians discussed was pay. They want the ALA to allow job advertisements in the group’s American Libraries magazine and other publications only if the postings include minimum and maximum pay offered. The librarians said it’s difficult for their colleagues to negotiate with employers for higher salaries without this information.
But many employers, particularly academic institutions, refuse to include this information in their job postings. Some of the librarians said the ALA is reluctant to force colleges to include salary ranges for fear they will pull their ads, thus reducing the library association’s advertising revenue. The women’s group wants to push the ALA’s governing body, though, not to be cowed by higher-education institutions on this issue.
The women’s group also is concerned that speakers at ALA conferences are more often men than women. The group wants to gather data for the past several years on the gender of conference speakers and see if its suspicion is true. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Tuesday January 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [16]January 14, 2008
Librarian: Ohio State Professors Need Copyright Refresher
Beware of faculty members who are clueless about whether they hold the copyrights to their research papers, Trisha Davis, a librarian at Ohio State University, told a group of librarians today at the midwinter conference of the American Library Association.
She made the remark while discussing the challenges Ohio State faced in building an institutional repository. The university has over 21,000 articles — including conference papers, teaching materials, photographs, and multimedia works — in the archive.
Faculty members will submit research papers to the repository often unaware that they have signed away the rights to their work to a journal publisher, Ms. Davis said. “They are stunned that they have not retained the copyrights,” she said. “They’re vehemently adamant” that they still have rights to the work.
Also, she added, faculty members sometimes add other scholars’ material to the repository, incorrectly assuming that this is allowed under fair use. — Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Monday January 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [10]Advice for Librarians Who Want to Write
Sure, librarians read a lot. But many aspire to be authors, too. At a discussion Saturday morning during the midwinter American Library Association conference, young librarians and those still in library school were offered tips from their colleagues on how to get published. Here are some of the recommendations:
- Write book reviews.
- Find a publication that covers your area of expertise, and pitch an article to its publisher.
- Find a topic no one’s written about.
- Check out Web sites — such as Beyond the Job and A Library Writer’s Blog — that regularly put out calls for papers.
- Pair up with a more experienced colleague and offer to help him or her write a paper. —Andrea L. Foster
Librarians at For-Profit Institutions Seek to Be Heard
Librarians at for-profit academic institutions are serving notice: They’re real librarians and they’re tired of being ignored. A group for librarians who work at for-profit institutions recently formed within the Association of College & Research Libraries, and members gathered Sunday morning at the midwinter conference of the American Library Association to share their concerns.
One problem the librarians have is that state library consortia exclude their institutions from membership. The librarians say that’s unfair, especially since their students — as state taxpayers — help to pay for these consortia. In addition, many libraries at trade schools and other for-profit institutions have unusual collections, in areas like cooking or art, that could be shared more broadly if the institutions were members of consortia.
Another concern: Some library vendors — such as JSTOR, the nonprofit digital archive of scholarly publications — are barred from selling their services or products to for-profit colleges.
Why do for-profit colleges face these hurdles? The librarians at the morning discussion said state rules and previously-negotiated contracts may require the state consortia and the nonprofit vendors to deal exclusively with libraries at nonprofit institutions. Still, the librarians at for-profit colleges are hoping they can work together to become more accepted within academe. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Monday January 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [6]Candidates for Presidency of Library Group Stake Out Their Positions
Librarians were introduced Sunday to two candidates vying for the presidency of the Association of College and Research Libraries: Lori Goetsch, dean of libraries at Kansas State University, and Janice Simmons-Welburn, dean of university libraries at Marquette University.
The candidates answered questions from their colleagues at a luncheon during the midwinter conference of the American Library Association. Both women said that the organization they hope to lead had served them well in their careers, and that they wanted to make it more responsive to members’ needs.
Where the two differed was on emphasis. Ms. Goetsch focused on workforce issues for librarians. Ms. Simmons-Welburn concentrated on the organization’s role as an advocate for libraries and for the dissemination of information.
What surprised librarians in the audience was how civil and courteous the presentation was. The two candidates appeared to be friends, occasionally joking and saying they agreed with each other’s ideas. In the past, observers said, candidates for the post have been more confrontational.
Members vote electronically. The group is expected to announce the winner of the election in the spring. She will serve as vice president and president-elect for a year before becoming president. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Monday January 14, 2008 | Permalink | CommentWould a YouTube Video Create Buzz Around Your Library?
Many librarians attending the American Library Association conference have been sharing their frustrations about how challenging it is to get students and faculty members to take advantage of their libraries’ resources or their own expertise as librarians. On Saturday, Richard T. Sweeney, university librarian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, recommended today that his colleagues consider exploiting YouTube.
Mr. Sweeney, who frequently speaks about how academe needs to adjust to impatient Millennials, suggested providing students with cameras and having them produce videos about libraries that can be uploaded to the video-sharing site. “It’s an opportunity to create buzz” around the library, said Mr. Sweeney. He said Millennials watch YouTube videos as much as they watch television.
Don’t dismiss the video-sharing site, he warned his audience, adding that YouTube even contains videos on calculus concepts. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Monday January 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [4]Librarians Prodded to Use Reusable Mugs
Librarians, as a whole, tend to be politically and socially progressive, so it’s no surprise that a group of librarians—the Task Force on the Environment of the Social Responsibilities Round Table—is encouraging their colleagues at the midwinter conference of the American Library Association to be environmentally responsible and use mugs or re-usable water bottles in place of paper or Styrofoam cups. The goal is to reduce waste.
The task force is calling its campaign “Cup by Cup for a Greener ALA.” If every person attending the conference uses coffee cups, the group says, “more than 10,000 paper or Styrofoam cups would not enter already overflowing landfills.”
The campaign doesn’t appear to have caught on, though. This conference-goer has seen lots of people drinking coffee from paper and Styrofoam cups during the past three days, and only a handful of people drinking the beverage from a mug. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Monday January 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [7]Blogs Are Increasingly Venues for Scholarship, Librarians Are Told
For those who are skeptical that blogs can really change the face of publishing and scholarship, consider the case of Reed A. Cartwright. A postdoctoral geneticist at the University of Georgia, Mr. Cartwright posted his random thoughts on a mutant plant gene on his blog in March 2005.
Six months later a plant geneticist at the University California at Davis contacted Mr. Cartwright after reading his post. The California researcher said that he had coincidentally arrived at the same hypothesis offered by Mr. Cartwright, and that he was about to publish his research in Plant Cell. The plant geneticist said he felt obligated to acknowledge Mr. Cartwright’s blog post and offered to make him a co-author of his article. Mr. Cartwright, who is not a plant geneticist, accepted the offer.
A group of librarians at the American Library Association midwinter conference heard that story Saturday from Andre Brown, a doctoral student in physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Brown wanted to impress on the librarians that blogs are increasingly being used by scientific researchers for sharing of ideas and developing new ones. Mr. Brown himself helps run a blog for biophysicists. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Monday January 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [3]January 11, 2008
U. of Pittsburgh Librarian Calls Library Medieval
Rush G. Miller, the University of Pittsburgh’s librarian, gave a speech this afternoon at the American Library Association conference about how libraries must embrace technology and constantly change to meet patrons’ needs.
Mr. Miller, who holds a doctorate in medieval English history, said that when he came to Pittsburgh, in 1994, he concluded that the library was a feudal society.
“I said, Whoa, I haven’t seen this since I studied it,” he said, as the audience broke out laughing. “You had kings and lords and people surrounded by moats.” —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Friday January 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [2]