EDUCAUSE | Contributed by Organizations or Campuses; Articles, Papers, and Reports; and Information Access Management

Enhancing Graduate Education: A Fresh Look at Library Engagement

ckeller — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:02:14 -0600

Over 100 librarians, administrators, faculty, and other members of the academic community concerned about issues relating to graduate education convened in Washington DC on October 12, 2007, to participate in the forum "Enhancing Graduate Education: A Fresh Look at Library Engagement."2 Sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the event promoted engagement in conceptualizing the library's evolving role in graduate education, and it encouraged academic libraries to begin considering new ways to partner with the broader graduate studies community. The forum was inspired by the Council of Graduate Schools 2007 report, Graduate Education: The Backbone of American Competitiveness and Innovation,3 which examines the current state of graduate education and how it influences the positioning of the United States in the global economy. Asserting the need for cooperation across education, business, and policy sectors, the report emphasizes the need to strengthen and promote an educational model that will "enhance US innovation and national security in the 21st century."4 The report's authors emphasized essential cooperation across sectors, enhanced flexibility within institutions of higher education, and focus on interdisciplinarity and globalization, themes that were equally dominant throughout the daylong
forum.

On the Record: Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control

ckeller — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:47:09 -0600

This is the final report from The Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.

The Report is based on the key premise that the community is at a critical juncture in the evolution of bibliographic control and information access/provision. It is time to take stock of past practices, to look at today's trends, and to project a future path consistent with the goals of bibliographic control: to facilitate discovery, management, identification, and access of and to library materials and other information products. Libraries must work in the most efficient and cooperative manner to minimize where possible the costs of bibliographic control, but both the Library of Congress and library administrators generally must recognize that they need to identify and allocate (or, as appropriate, reallocate) sufficient funding if they are serious about attaining the goals of improved and expanded bibliographic control.

Metasearch Authentication and Access Management

drupal — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 14:53:09 -0500

"Metasearch – also called parallel search, federated search, broadcast search, and cross-database search – has become commonplace in the information community's vocabulary. All speak to a common theme of searching and retrieving from multiple databases, sources, platforms, protocols, and vendors at the point of the user's request. Metasearch services rely on a variety of approaches including open standards (such as NISO's Z39.50 and SRU/SRW), proprietary programming interfaces, and "screen scraping." However, the absence of widely supported standards, best practices, and tools makes the metasearch environment less efficient for the metasearch provider, the content provider, and ultimately the end-user."

Libraries Fear Digital Lockdown

drupal — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 10:15:59 -0600

In comments submitted to the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group, which is investigating digital rights management (DRM) technologies, the British Library has expressed strong concerns about the long-term viability of electronic resources. Content producers increasingly use DRM to limit unauthorized access to electronic materials, but officials from the library said the protections also threaten legitimate uses of content. Use of materials held by libraries constitutes an important exception to copyright laws, according to Clive Field, the British Library's director of scholarships and collections, but DRM tools inadvertently upset the balance between appropriate exceptions and the rights of content owners. Moreover, long-term access is at risk. Even when copyright expires for a work, the DRM tools applied to its electronic version will still be in place. If the owner cannot be contacted, there might be no way to unlock materials that are no longer covered by copyright. "This will fundamentally threaten the longstanding and accepted concepts of fair dealing and library privilege," according to the British Library's statement, "and undermine...legitimate public good access."

E-resources for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences - A British Academy Policy Review

drupal — Fri, 20 May 2005 11:53:03 -0500

Information and communications technology is having a major impact in the form of, and access to, research resources. The Academy has consulted national and representative bodies, and individual researchers, and has examined the technical and organisational issues of e-resource provision and access. Its survey and analysis leads to a series of recommendations addressed to institutions and to individual researchers.

How Does Technology Affect Access in Postsecondary Education? What Do We Really Know?

drupal — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 11:42:00 -0600

This report examines the relationship between technology and access to postsecondary education, and identifies four basic themes: technology and access to postsecondary education in general; access to technology-based learning; preparation for using technology; and the effectiveness of technology in learning. The report presents a review of the more recent literature concerning each of these themes, and in addition, offers new analyses of national data that expands and further informs the knowledge base. The report concludes with some recommendations for additional data collection through NCES surveys.

A Comparative Assessment of Web Accessibility and Technical Standards Conformance in Four EU States

drupal — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 09:32:12 -0500

The Internet is playing a progressively more important part in our day–to–day life, through its power of making information universally available. People with disabilities have particular opportunities to benefit. Using the Internet in conjunction with dedicated assistive technologies, tasks that were very difficult if not impossible to achieve for people with various types of disability can now be made fully accessible — at least, in principle. However, in practice, many online resources and services are still poorly accessible to those with disability due to unsatisfactory Web content design.Design of accessible Web content is codified in standards and guidelines of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Conformance with W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG) (and/or similar, derivative guidelines) is now the subject of considerable activity, both legal and technical, in many different jurisdictions.This paper presents results of a comparative survey of Web accessibility guidelines and HTML standards conformance for samples of Web sites drawn from Ireland, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. It also gives some recommendations on how to improve the accessibility level of Web content.A particular conclusion of the study is that the general level of Web accessibility guidelines and HTML standards conformance in all of the samples studied is very poor; and that the pattern of failure is strikingly consistent in the four samples. Although considerable efforts are being made to promote Web accessibility for users with disabilities, this is certainly not yet manifesting itself in improving Web accessibility and HTML validity.

Issues in Accessing Distance Education Technologies for Individuals with Disabilities

drupal — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 16:33:00 -0500

Participants in the Technology Strand of the National Summit are asked to focus their thoughts and efforts on three key issues important in accessible distance education. This discussion paper will be used to frame workgroup topics and time allocations. The first issue is the potential to produce, procure, and use natively accessible hardware and software. The second issue moves beyond accessible technology to the promise and barriers of the design, layout and delivery of accessible content in distance education. The final issue for participant consideration is the importance of education and ongoing support of divergent stakeholder groups, including technical staff, instructors, and end-users with disabilities.

Enabling Access in Digital Libraries: A Report on a Workshop on Access Management

drupal — Thu, 23 Sep 1999 16:48:38 -0500

The workshop described in this report focused on the management of access to published information resources through research libraries. Topics discussed include privacy, protection of rights, authorization, and authentication.Among the groups seeking to meet the challenge of access management are the Digital Library Federation (DLF), which consists of major research libraries and archives in the United States, the Center for Research on Information Access (CRIA) at Columbia University, and the Information and Intelligent Systems Division of the Computers, Information Sciences and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation (NSF). On April 6, 1998, they brought together expert practitioners and researchers from several disciplines at a workshop, held at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., to explore some of the more pressing questions for research libraries.