Library News, Reviews, and Views
If you’re an academic librarian, you’re probably already awash, at least peripherally, in news about MOOCs—massive open online courses have been touted as the next big thing in higher ed since they burst on the scene about a year ago. If you’re a public librarian, on the other hand, you may not even have heard of them. Yet MOOCs are bringing unprecedented challenges and opportunities to both kinds of libraries already, and they’re only going to grow.
aBeginning May 8, instructors providing Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) via Coursera will have the option to supplement their video lectures with content from major academic publishers Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, SAGE Publications,and Wiley, at no cost to their students. And that’s just the beginning: “Coursera is also actively discussing pilot agreements and related alliances with Springer and additional publishers,” the company said in a statement. This could be a sea change for both MOOCs and publishers’ business models.
Just under 1,000 library professionals gathered in San Francisco from April 24-26 eager and curious to learn about the latest product news from Innovative Interfaces and also to hear the company’s new leadership articulate the firm’s direction after a year of upheaval.
Virtually all parents surveyed by the Pew Internet & American Life Project for its Parents, Children, Libraries, and Reading study—94 percent—say libraries are important for their children; nearly 80 percent say they’re very important.
Once you click post/publish and the material becomes publicly accessible, you’ve lost full control of the item. Today, I want to point out a free online resource that makes deleted tweets from elected politicians from around the globe searchable and accessible named Politwoops.
The Douglas County Libraries’ (DCL) pioneering project to own, rather than license, much of its e-content has not only forged a new business model but also exposed a new frontier in metadata. As of March, about 22,000 of the library’s nearly 58,000 e-content titles had been purchased directly from publishers and stored on an Adobe Content Server (ACS), and it became quickly apparent to library staff that we were going to have to get creative with the metadata associated with this material.
The Internet Archive (IA) and their wonderful Archive-It service is continuing to build and make searchable a collection of materials/news reports/social media about the Boston Marathon Bombing. In Their Own Words: This collection is comprised of contributions from curators and subject matter experts; and includes news articles, blogs, social media sites, and organizational websites related [...]
From The Fort Worth Star-Telegram: There’s a tightrope across the digital divide that nearly 7,000 librarians meeting this week in Fort Worth are crossing, but some aren’t tiptoeing. They’re leaping across the gap and looking for ways to stay at the forefront of a new age in reading. [Clip] Some librarians aren’t willing to let [...]
From the Wikimedia Foundation: A year after its announcement as the first new Wikimedia project since 2006, Wikidata has now begun to serve the over 280 language versions of Wikipedia as a common source of structured data that can be used in more than 25 million articles of the free encyclopedia. By providing Wikipedia editors [...]
The stock market has hit record highs, and unemployment has reached the lowest level since the recession began. Despite this good news, the library economic environment has not seen commensurate improvement. There continues to be a struggle to find the resources needed to support library collections and services, and conditions remain highly unsettled.
INFOdocket by Gary Price
