Information Access Management

While students and educators clamor for unfettered access to the Internet, IT professionals are shoved against the firewall by the likes of the RIAA and the Union of Concerned Parents for a Safe College Experience. What are the educational arguments for open networks in higher education? Can’t the kids just look at YouTube and Facebook at Starbuck’s? What’s the use of an open-laptop, Internet-enabled classroom? What’s the duty of an educational institution regarding digital rights management? Is censorship of particular sites or content the proper role of higher education? This lively session will discuss these and other topics.

Only by transforming knowledge contained in print to new and easily accessible digital formats can we guarantee its survival.

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.

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.

"The dream of ubiquitous information environments may be at hand, but how well do they support
scholarly and scientific research?"

The Fluid Project is an international community of academic institutions, community source software projects and corporations working together to address the precarious values of usability, accessibility, internationalization, quality assurance and security within academic software projects.

Fluid combines both design and technology to create a living library of sharable user interface components that can be reused across community source projects. These components are built specifically to support flexibility and customization while maintaining a high standard of design quality. The Fluid framework will enable designers and developers to build user interfaces that can more readily accommodate the diverse personal and institutional needs found within community source projects.

Fluid will encourage user-centered design practices within community source software. To this end, we are creating a designer's toolkit that will offer useful design, accessibility, and usability strategies and documentation. Members of the Fluid team are available to provide usability and accessibility support within the Sakai, uPortal, Kuali Student, and Moodle communities.