Category Archives: access

Open Access and the privacy tradeoff

23 February 2008 – 6:45 am

Writing for Inside Higher Ed, librarian and professor Barbara Fister examines the trade-offs we make when signing up for that new Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn account.
When you participate in such online communities, you give up some of your right to privacy and some aspects of control over the intellectual property you create in that environment. [...]

By Margaret L Ruwoldt | Also posted in collaboration, knowledge transfer, online, publishing | Comments (0)

Congratulations to Michael Geist

22 February 2008 – 2:32 pm

Congratulations to Professor Michael Geist, who has received a 2008 Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award.
The award recognises “significant and influential contributions to the development of computer-mediated communications and to the empowerment of individuals in using computers and the Internet.”
Michael was a keynote speaker at the VALA 2008 conference in Melbourne earlier this month.
We at the [...]

By Margaret L Ruwoldt | Also posted in events | Comments (0)

Literacy, old and new

16 February 2008 – 6:54 am

Last year the USA’s National Endowment for the Arts released a study called To Read or Not To Read: a question of national consequence. NEA chair Dana Gioia said, “This study shows the startling declines, in how much and how well Americans read, that are adversely affecting this country’s culture, economy, and civic life as [...]

By Margaret L Ruwoldt | Also posted in online, users | Comments (2)

One million books digitised at UMichigan

14 February 2008 – 9:02 am

The University of Michigan is scanning its 7.5 million books and putting their contents online.
This month, they passed the million mark. The commemorative web page provides information about the digitisation project:

a PDF showing the steps involved in digitising a book
presentation slides explaining the size and shape of the digitisation project
photos of the library staff who [...]

By Margaret L Ruwoldt | Also posted in collaboration, online, search | Comments (0)

Melbourne 6th in Australia, 128th in world for web visibility

14 February 2008 – 6:29 am

The Webometrics.info project uses four metrics to calculate a ranking of the online research profile of the world’s universities:

Size: Number of pages recovered from four search engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead.
Visibility: Total number of unique inbound links external links, based on results from Yahoo Search, Live Search and Exalead.
Rich files: Number of PDF, [...]

By Margaret L Ruwoldt | Also posted in online, publishing, repositories, research, search | Comments (0)