 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
Wired Campus e-newsletter | RSS
| Atom
Contact us with feedback, story ideas and tips.
Recent Posts
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]
Categories
American Library Association, Phildelphia, 2008
Business
Campus Innovations
Distance Education
Educause 2007
Law
Libraries
Most Discussed
Peer-to-Peer
Research
Search Engines
Second Life
Security
Social Networking
Student Life
Teaching
TechForum2008
Video
Blogroll
May 7, 2008
Orphan-Works Bill Sails Through House Panel
A House panel today unanimously approved a bill that would make it easier for scholars and others to make use of orphan works.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, said she would offer an amendment to remove the bill’s “dark archive” provision before the House Judiciary Committee votes on the issue. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Wednesday May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [4]In Wikipedia, Length Matters
A new study found that in Wikipedia, word count can be used to predict article quality.
Joshua E. Blumenstock at the University of California at Berkeley analyzed articles to see if he could predict whether an article was “featured” on Wikipedia’s homepage, which would indicate that it had received extra vetting from top editors to verify its exceptional quality. He looked at 100 variables that might correlate with whether an article ended up as a feature, including number of citations, readability metrics, one-syllable words, etc.
He found that using word count alone, he could predict with 97% accuracy whether an article was featured or not. Considering the full “kitchen sink” of all 100 variables only improved his accuracy slightly to 97.99%. The magic word-count cut-off seemed to be 1,830 words, above which articles were likely to be higher-quality, featured entries. Mr. Blumenstock speculated that the collaborative nature of Wikipedia may force longer articles to be higher quality.
Still, he wrote, “[f]eatured articles are meant to be ‘the best that Wikipedia has to offer’; these results indicate that they might merely be the longest Wikipedia has to offer,” he wrote. “The high degree to which word count can approximate Wikipedia’s elaborate peer-review process is somewhat unsettling.”—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Wednesday May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [7]May 6, 2008
Library Group Favors Senate Over House Bill on Orphan Works
The American Library Association is urging its membership to contact their senators and representatives in the U.S. Congress and press them to support the Senate version of a bill, S 2913, that would make it easier for people to exploit orphan works. These are books, films, photographs, music, and other creative works that cannot be reused by scholars and archivists because they are unable to find the works’ owners. Those who make use of the material risk incurring penalties for copyright infringement.
A comparable bill in the House of Representatives, HR 5889, is flawed, the library group states, because it includes a “dark archive” provision that would require people to notify the U.S. Copyright Office of their intention to use an orphan work. That provision would be onerous for scholars, who may be forced to confer with university lawyers before filing a notice with the copyright office, the library group states.
A House panel with jurisdiction over intellectual property issues is scheduled to discuss and vote on the bill Wednesday.—Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Tuesday May 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [10]May 1, 2008
Sparky Awards Theme Announced
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition this week announced the Second Annual Sparky Awards, a competition for students to create videos about “to promote the open exchange of information.”
This year’s theme is “MindMashup: the Value of Information Sharing.” Students are asked to create videos no longer than two minutes that “imaginatively portray the benefits of the open, legal exchange of information,” according to a news release. The winning entry will receive $1,000. Last year’s winners can be found here.
Sparc is an international alliance of academic and research libraries that promotes open access to scholarship. It is co-sponsoring the Sparky Awards with the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, Penn Libraries (at the University of Pennsylvania), Students for Free Culture, and the Student PIRGs. —Catherine Rampell
Posted on Thursday May 1, 2008 | Permalink | CommentApril 29, 2008
Community College Open-Textbook Project Gets Under Way
The Community College Open Textbook Project begins this week with a member meeting in California.
At the meeting, representatives of institutions around the country will start reviewing open-textbook models for “quality, usability, accessibility, and sustainability,” according to a news release. They will initially review four providers of free online educational resources: Connexions, run by Rice University; Flat World Knowledge, a commercial digital-textbook publisher that will begin offering free textbooks online next year; the University of California’s UC College Prep Online, which offers Advanced Placement and other courses online; and the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, which was founded by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and the League for Innovation in the Community College.
The open-textbook project was paid for by a $530,000 grant to the Foothill-De Anza Community College District from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. —Catherine Rampell
Posted on Tuesday April 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [5]Digitized Archive of European Dance Established by U. of Utah Scholars
A professor and a curator at the University of Utah have created a Web site devoted to European dance, theater, and visual arts from 1600 to 1850. Called Dramatis Personae Archive, the site includes rare digitized books, maps, newspapers, and journals from the university’s J. Willard Marriott Library. The Web site grew out of a French-theater course taught by Christine A. Jones, a languages and literature professor. She teamed with Luise Poulton, a curator at the library, so her students could be exposed to rare dance books. Students in the class each posted to the Web site a summary on a book.
The course received an innovation award this year from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Tuesday April 29, 2008 | Permalink | CommentApril 25, 2008
Legislation to Ease Problem of Orphan Works Is Introduced in Congress
Congress is revisiting the longstanding problem of orphan works. These are books, films, photographs, music, and other creative works that cannot be reused by scholars and archivists because they are unable to find the works’ owners. Those who make use of the material risk incurring penalties for copyright infringement. Experts estimate that as much as 22 percent of an academic library’s books are orphaned. (See full coverage in The Chronicle).
Lawmakers who lead committees on intellectual-property issues on Thursday introduced legislation that would exempt scholars and others from facing excessive copyright-infringement penalties for using orphan works. They would need to first diligently try to locate the works’ owners. Should the owners surface after a work has been reused they would receive some compensation, but could not stop the derivative creation from being distributed.
The bills, the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008, S. 2913, in the Senate; and the Orphan Works Act of 2008, H.R. 5889, in the U.S. House of Representatives, are supported by the Association of Research Libraries, the Internet Archive, and the Recording Industry Association of America, among other groups. Lawmakers introduced similar legislation two years ago after the U.S. Copyright Office offered its own solution. But the bills stalled, largely because of opposition from groups representing photographers, illustrators, and textile designers. They said the bills failed to adequately compensate copyright owners. The recent bills have tried to address their concerns but it’s unclear whether the groups will find them acceptable. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Friday April 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [4]April 23, 2008
Germany's Wikipedia: Coming to a Bookstore Near You!
A major German publisher has decided to sell print copies of a portion of the the German-language version of Wikipedia, the New York Times reports.
The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia published by Bertelsmann will contain summaries of the 25,000 most popular articles. It willl go on sale in September for 19.95 euros, or about $32.
Beate Varnhorn, the editor in charge of Bertelsmann’s reference works, told the Times that the book is intended to appeal to “new target groups, including young people.”—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Wednesday April 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [3]April 22, 2008
Flashing Lights Warn Library Visitors to Be Quiet
To tamp down the noise level in their libraries, some colleges are considering installing a warning system that looks like a traffic signal. Called the Deluxe Yacker Tracker, the device flashes a yellow light to indicate when the noise exceeds a certain level. When it exceeds the level by at least 15 decibels, the red light illuminates and a siren can go off, too.
What ever happened to just approaching students and telling them to keep it down?—-Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Tuesday April 22, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [29]April 21, 2008
'Encyclopaedia Britannica' Is Now Free to Bloggers
Encyclopaedia Britannica, which apparently fears being nudged into irrelevance by the proliferation of free online reference sources, has started giving bloggers free access to its articles, TechCrunch reports.
Reference sites such as Wikipedia, which are often criticized for their amateur (if zealous) authorship sources, have made the expensive, expert-vetted, hard-bound book set a less popular purchase. (Comscore analysis, also reported on TechCrunch, found that “[f]or every page viewed on Brittanica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia,” or 3.8 billion v. 21 million page views per month).
Under a new program entitled Britannica WebShare, the encyclopedia publisher is allowing “people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers,” to read and link to the encyclopedia’s online articles. The company seems to hope that by offering its services free to Web publishers, links to Britannica articles will proliferate across the Internet and will persuade regular Web surfers to cough up $1,400 for the encyclopedia’s 32-volume set, or perhaps $70 for an annual online subscription. —Catherine Rampell
Posted on Monday April 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [12]