EDUCAUSE | Contributed by Organizations or Campuses; Articles, Papers, and Reports; and Information Discovery and Retrieval

The Little Engine That Can

ckeller — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:35:08 -0500

The History Engine site is an online resource for students to search and browse written tidbits — what historians behind the project call “episodes” — and to contribute their own entries to a growing online ecosystem that is connected via semantic links, time stamps and geographic tags (with mapping functionality on the way).

Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future

ckeller — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:08:48 -0500

This study was commissioned by the British Library and JISC to identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years' time. This is to help library and information services to anticipate and react to any new or emerging behaviours in the most effective way. In this report, we define the `Google generation' as those born after 1993 and explore the world of a cohort of young people with little or no recollection of life before the web.

Handbook for Information Literacy Teaching

ckeller — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 09:51:03 -0600

This Handbook was written by a group of subject librarians at Cardiff University to support their colleagues in Information Services as they developed their information literacy teaching.

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.

Folksonomies and Image Tagging: Seeing the Future?

ckeller — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 12:37:34 -0600

This article gives an overview on folksonomies, what they are and how people use them.

Searching Video Lectures

ckeller — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 15:59:34 -0600

A tool from MIT finds keywords so that students can efficiently review lectures.

‘Scholarship in the Digital Age’

ckeller — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 12:19:17 -0600

"It’s hard to meet academics these days whose work hasn’t been changed by the Internet. But even if everyone knows that the world of scholarship has changed, it’s not always clear just how or the way those evolutions fit into the broad history of scholarship. Christine L. Borgman sets out to do just that in Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet, just published by MIT Press. Borgman, a presidential chair in information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, responded to e-mail questions about her book. "

Using Blogs for Formative Assessment and Interactive Teaching

ckeller — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 16:05:10 -0500

This case study shows how students were taught the skills they need to find information relevant to their subject area. As groups of students are generally seen once only, measures to assess the effectiveness of teaching are needed, i.e. to determine the skills the students have acquired. Blogs were used as a tool for formative assessment and were used to measure student expectations before teaching, and their level of satisfaction with the session afterwards. The blog [1] helps the tutor to understand if learning outcomes have been achieved and whether the session has met student expectations. It also requires students to reflect on the skills that they have acquired.

Beyond Google: How do students conduct academic research?

ckeller — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:59:47 -0500

This paper reports findings from an exploratory study about how students majoring in humanities and social sciences use the Internet and library resources for research. Using student discussion groups, content analysis, and a student survey, our results suggest students may not be as reliant on public Internet sites as previous research has reported. Instead, students in our study used a hybrid approach for conducting course–related research. A majority of students leveraged both online and offline sources to overcome challenges with finding, selecting, and evaluating resources and gauging professors’ expectations for quality research.