Web Seminars Contributed by EDUCAUSE and Electronic Resources

Ithaka's research group studies how new technologies are affecting higher education and how colleges and universities can best manage these changes in four discrete program areas: providing academia with the policy basis needed to transition effectively and responsibly away from print collections and toward increasingly electronic-only collections; helping information-services organizations meet the needs of scholars by understanding their changing attitudes and practices; improving the community's understanding of how new information resources drive teaching and learning practices; and analyzing strategies for the most effective possible dissemination of knowledge from colleges and universities to researchers, students, and other learners. This presentation will review these areas of work and highlight some key findings, encouraging discussion about these and other key strategic issues facing higher education.

Community-generated media is the real-world equivalent of “user-generated content” online. As our major media begin to roll out into our streets via wireless networks, handheld devices, and public displays, an exciting opportunity arises for the personal and social potential of these media to foster a "Renaissance 2.0" within our cities and community spaces. Ambient urban media still follows a broadcast paradigm (like TV), whereas the primary dynamic of public space is social (like the Internet). Humanity's participative nature will make it possible for communities to collectively create vibrant, hyperlocal identities for themselves through media. Think of CGM as a “strange loop” where communities generate media that generate community.

The collective expertise of digital libraries in making available the diverse literatures of science and artistic expression, in concert with the increasing sophistication of commercial partners and the development of distributed, interactive forms of publishing, require libraries to chart the engineering of new architectures for teaching, learning, and research. Digital libraries must work to forge the new collaborations required to enable and build these services.