June 2006 Archives

Kate Wittenberg, director of EPIC, the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia, wrote a Point of View piece for the June 16th Chronicle re: the need for new models of scholarly publising. The Point of View piece is titled: "Beyond Google: What Next for Publishing?"

Addressing her opening point to those engaged in scholarly publishing, Wittenberg wrote that "... students have been quietly revolutionizing the discovery and use of information" the effect of which "urgently forces those of us in scholarly publishing to confront some fundamental questions about our organizations, jobs, and assumptions about our work."

Shortly after spring break ended and I put the finishing touches on my summer IRLS573 course, I revised my information pages for faculty interested in instructional blogging, podcasting, and faculty websites.

In the process, I revised the Blogging @ the LTC pages and Best Practices & Case Studies pages.

If you know an instructor or member of the UA faculty who might benefit from any of these resources, please pass this information along to them.

Spring semester several students in a technical writing class had a project to develop a student handbook and community handbook for Through Our Parents' Eyes. Unfortunately, their work was incomplete, incorrect in places, and overall useless. However, it motivated me to get some pages together.

Last week days I put up student handbook and community handbook sections. The idea behind each is to give students and community visitors, respectively, a place to go for a guide to using Through Our Parents' Eyes. Check them and send along any feedback (and typos) in email.

Through Our Parents' Eyes is pretty large at this point so it's a challenge to figure out what to leave in, what to leave out these sorts of resources.

Over the past few years a lot of academic institutions have attempted to implement dSpace or Fedora. These are bot open source software applications to building institutional repositories. The UA had a collaborative effort a couple years ago that Steve Buckler, Chris Johnson and library staff were involved in to implement dSpace. As far I know that has been tabled. If that is wrong, please comment to this message. Now what about Deep Blue?

This morning's Campus Technology IT Trends alerting service reported:

U-M Library Launches Deep Blue: More Access to U-M Scholarship

The University of Michigan is sharing more than 24,000 research items with the public via a new searchable Internet library system. This press release describes the site as "a customized version of the DSpace software created by MIT and Hewlett-Packard. It was designed and is managed by U-M's Library Information Technology group, standard-setters for quality research and innovation via initiatives ranging from Making of America to the Google Print project."

24,000 research items is extremely impressive. For many institutions, building it was not sufficient. Rights to the intellectual property being held by commercial publishers and an overall lack of particpation by content generators has hampered progress. In June of 2004, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article, "Papers Wanted: Online archives run by universities struggle to attract material," in which the challenges to build these repositories were reviewed. Perhaps UM's success indicates that the early barriers have been overcome?