Blogs

As the second day gets underway at the EDUCAUSE Summit on campus security and emergency management, many lingering questions from the first day still remain, demonstrating the complexity of the problem at hand. While sharing insights at the close of Monday’s sessions, participants continued to comment on the need for greater information sharing and collaboration across institutions. “We have similar needs yet individual solutions,” one participant said, noting that campuses tend to develop their own solutions instead of leverage the wider community’s expertise. Universities need a way to share their needs so that their peers can see them and say, “We’re already working on it.”

After brief introductions, participants in the EDUCAUSE Summit, “The Role of Information Technology in Campus Security and Emergency Management,” began working in small groups, imagining the “hallmarks” of an effectively managed disaster and a 100 percent safe campus.

They came back together, as a larger group, to share their lists. Among the top characteristics of an effectively managed disaster:

• As a guiding principle: Prevention, Detection, Recovery
• Effective, useful, and appropriate communications
• Minimizing Losses
• Smooth transitions from emergency environment to normal status and vice versa
• Speed of execution
• Key actors understood and performed their roles as expected (Able to adapt as situation evolves)
• All the technology worked
• No turf wars, jurisdiction understood
• Unified leadership
• “Playbook” (manual of emergency procedures and processes) up to date and available
• Practice made perfect

And a campus that’s 100 percent safe:

I have just returned from my business trip to Kiev Polytechnic Institute. It has been my first visit to Ukraine so I was a bit afraid of visiting a wild slovanic country. So I decided to address to a Kiev trip agency. They met me in Boryspil airport and conveyed me and my luggage to my appartments that they rented for me in advance. I have lived for 2 months in Ukraine and I have only good impressions about this country.

Recently as many other post-soviet countries It has begun to develop. Now you feel in Kiev almost like in Europe, but services and products are considerably cheaper. People are kind and polite, though maybe only to foreigners :).

Geographically Ukraine is a state in Eastern Europe, bounded on the north by Belarus, on the north and east by the Russian Federation, on the west by Poland, Slovakia, on the southwest by Hungary, Rumania, and Moldova, and on the south by the Black Sea and the Azov Sea.

Since Tuesday I have been in Milwaukee visiting SOIS and CIPR as part of my Information Ethics fellowship. I attended a discussion about a possible future conference on translating intercultural information ethics across the situated understandings that term implies across a plurality of contexts. That seems like a great project, I'm happy to help out there. For the rest of the time, I attended the conference Thinking Critically:Alternative Perspectives and Methods in Information Studies. It was an excellent conference and I met many interesting people in the field of information studies, most of which are leaders in their field or soon to be so. I also attended the 2008 Samore Lecture: "Interpreting the Digital Human," by Professor Rafael Capurro, at the Allis Museum, which provided an excellent end to the conference. I had excellent dinners and conversation with colleagues that I've not seen for some time, and with new friends and colleagues.

Last last week, someone impersonating a valid user was issued an account with EDUCAUSE and posted a range of inappropriate material.  We apologize for the situation and are taking steps to mitigate the risk of this occurring again. 

So, how did the librarian get the word out? By regularly reporting to the library board that no NSL had been issued to any of the city’s 10 branches, which was perfectly legal. Everyone knew that if the chief librarian failed to report that nothing had happened, then indeed an NSL had been served.
[From Privacy Work-Around]

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Sometimes the brilliance of the common sense of librarians is amazing. Given tight legal restrictions, they read the law, and found a solution that was compatible and in the end worked for their library

The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to submit journal articles that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/). The Policy requires that these articles be accessible to the public on PubMed Central to help advance science and improve human health.

[From Public Access Homepage]

overall, this will be an interesting thing to watch and track, as it will hit certain publishers, likely the smaller and middling medical publishers, more than others and thus drive market consolidation and prices for journals up. at least that is my expectation.

[From

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.: Single Book View
]

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Brent and I have "Chapter 11: The April 16 Archive: Collecting and Preserving Memories of the Virginia Tech Tragedy" in the above book.

Exploring Virtuality within and beyond Organizations (0230201288) PANTELI - Palgrave Macmillan]

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Nike Panteli and Mike Chiasson invited me to submit a chapter to this book ages ago. It took us a while to get it together and get out, but it looks like a great book.

Scriblio MATC Project Final Report

[From Scriblio » Scriblio MATC Project Final Report]

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Scriblio is a word press opac. In short it is a tool for libraries and other project that are interested in combine word press functionality with accessible catalogs. It looks like an interesting attempt.