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December 02, 2008
Virtual Words and Education
Bill Thompson's column at the BBC had an interesting article this past week about the uses of different virtual environments for educational purposes. Specifically, he compares the combat-centered World of Warcraft and the social Second Life. Surprisingly, a presenter at a conference he attended came to the conclusion that WOW produced a better sense of self-identification with the player-made character than did Second Life.
Of course, I can't imagine how WOW could be harnessed for educational means. Second Life is already being used by a variety of educational groups, including librarians. As social networking sites and software come into maturity, educational institutions need to give some serious thought into harnessing the power of Web 2.0. "Game," as Thompson notes, is a monumentally dismissive word for the varieties of virtual worlds that many young patrons are quite fluent at interacting with. There is no harm in aggressively marketing to patrons in locations, virtual or otherwise, they are likely to visit.
~Ross G.
Posted by colldev at 07:33 PM
Is Google Censoring?
As if information professionals needed another reason to question the validity of a Google search, the New York Times has a thought provoking article about Google's censorship policy. Google, being the multi-national company that it is, has to contend with a variety of international views and laws concerning censorship. Often, instead of supporting free speech, Google will simply remove the "offensive" links or videos (Google owns YouTube, after all) from their search returns.
Information professionals have often focused the energy of their struggles against patron over-reliance on Google and other internet search engines in the direction of the quality and validity of search returns. However, another important aspect of our professional lives involves standing up for free speech- so chalk up yet another reason to wean patrons from Google. Google, due to their dominance as a search provider, is setting themselves up as an international communications watchdog removed from any official oversight. In their defense, Google knows their present policies are unsustainable for the future. But will they do anything about it? Stay on your toes, librarians!
(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)
~Ross G.
Posted by colldev at 06:17 PM
Future of IR's
One problem for academic libraries that seems to just not want to go away is that of escalating costs of academic journals. I have heard statistics like over half of the dollar amount that universities spend on these journals goes towards the professional organizations that publish them. In other words, half of the price of a given journal is not even being put towards the cost of publishing the journal. All this makes me wonder whether universities have considered rebelling against this current structure and encouraging their faculty to publish their papers exclusively to their institutional repositories.
I am aware that the journal structure is sill the backbone of the academic publishing industry, however one can imagine a scenario whereby, over a period of time, academic institutions combine the strength of their open access IR's with the strength of their brand name to supersede the longstanding clutch journals have had on the market. In this way, those schools that have renown in a particular field will emerge is natural substitutes for a equivalent journal of the same field.
If we wanted to stretch the definition of an IR even further we could turn our attention in the direction of the university press. Because it is expected that faculty, those in the humanities in particular, publish books, we have a system of university presses that publish books of distinguished professors from all over. However, this process is rather expensive for the library as well, and if I'm not mistaken, most universities subsidize their presses, operating them at a loss. Could it be possible to expand our IR's to include these materials as well, making them more open and lowering the printing costs in the process?
Just a few thoughts I didn't manage to fit into my IR assignment and thought the Scholarly Comm. blog would be an appropriate forum.
-Published by Greg Hall
for IS 560: Management and Development of Collections
Posted by colldev at 02:06 PM
Harvard's Open Access Mandate
In the November 21, 2008 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, there is a diverse article on some current issues in Scholarly Communication, found here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i13/13a00801.htm. Among the issues discussed is that of Harvard University's role of establishing a precedent for creating an institutional open-access mandate. In February, Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to "adopt an open-access requirement, requiring faculty members to deposit copies of journal articles in a new university repository."
The new repository, still in beta-testing, is to be called Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard, or DASH. As is the case for the new NIH mandate, it has become essential for the University to get the word out to faculty and help them understand how to be in compliance. Harvard has established an Office of Scholarly Communication to work as a liaison in this regard. As there is much confusion and controversy surrounding the issue of publishing in IR's, it is smart to have this type of body. I would be curious to know how the faculty at Harvard are responding to this new mandate. Overall, it is great to see such a high-profile university taking a lead in open access, particularly Harvard, who tend to set the standards in this country for academia.
Published by Greg Hall for IS 560 Development and Management of Collection
Posted by colldev at 01:37 PM