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The folks at Best Colleges Online have created a list of 9 Ways Mobile is Moving into Academia. Mobile devices have made computing ubiquitous and colleges and universities are taking advantage of all that mobile has to offer in the areas of marketing, learning, mobile library access and more. Here are the first 5 ways discussed:
Sarah Kessler at Mashable identifies 7 Ways Universities Are Using Facebook as a Marketing Tool. This interesting article looks at the study done earlier this year at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth which asked a representative sample of U.S. schools whether they use some social media, 100% of them said they did. These are the ways that those universities are leveraging Facebook:
Facebook photo contest:
Fairfield University’s library sponsored a library photo contest for National Library week that built their Facebook following.
Rebranding:
The University of Missouri Kansas City used a variety of social media tools to rebrand their library system, raising visibility and putting a face on library services with a human touch.
David Escalante, Director of Computer Policy & Security at Boston College and Andrew J. Korty, Deputy Information Security Officer at Indiana University write for Educause Review about Cloud Services: Policy and Assessment. This excellent article discusses how to assess the risks of hosting institutional data with cloud providers. The article is organized into the following topic areas:
Data Held by Third Parties
Organizing for Third-Party Management
Criteria for Reviewing Third-Party Products and Services
Liz Dwyer at GOOD asks Are College Libraries About to Become Bookless? In a time of e-books and ubiquitous computing, what lies ahead for libraries? This is quite a though-provoking piece.
“The number of colleges using electronic textbooks available to students is on the rise. But what about the rest of the books on campus—the millions of volumes stored in the library? It turns out the digital text revolution is beginning to turn college libraries into places that no longer stock physical books.
As Time reports, the engineering libraries at Kansas State University, Stanford and the University of Texas are almost completely book-free. And now at Drexel University in Philadelphia, the new Library Learning Terrace, a 3,000 square foot residence hall-based space that opened in June, there are no books at all.”
Rachel Wiseman at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog writes about the Top 10 YouTube Videos Posted by Colleges, and What They Mean. This interesting article discusses which college videos have been the most successful and why. One of the top videos which made the list features a new book-retrieval system at the University of Chicago’s library.
Jennifer Howard at the Wired Campus blog writes about Digitizing the Campus Newspaper. According to the article, with a small amount of resources and student labor it’s possible to create a collection of unique materials for your library’s digital collection.
“Philadelphia—Want to add a set of unique materials to your campus library’s digital collection? Scan the archives of the student newspaper. That’s what Bart Schmidt, a digital-projects librarian at Drake University, decided to do last year with The Times-Delphic.
Most student-newspaper archives “are unindexed and totally underused,” Mr. Schmidt told people who stopped by his poster presentation this afternoon here at the Association of College and Research Libraries conference. But they represent a unique resource, he said. And “nobody else is digitizing your student newspaper.”
Joshua Kim at Inside Higher Ed posits that Librarians Are the Future of Ed Tech. In this thought-provoking article, Kim suggests five reasons why the “future of campus computing belongs to the librarians and the libraries”.
Luigina Vileno, Subject Librarian for Applied Human Sciences and Psychology at Concordia University has published an article in the most recent issue of Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research titled Testing the Usability of Two Online Research Guides. The article discusses a study that surveyed the use of academic subject guides to ultimately determine whether they are usable, how to improve them, and whether they are worth the effort.
“This article describes usability testing of two online research guides. One guide was in the area of applied human sciences and the other was geared toward the discipline of psychology. Six undergraduate students were given several tasks to complete by using the guides. The participants also completed two questionnaires. One described the participants’ demographics and how much time they spent on the Internet on a daily basis. On the other questionnaire, filled out after the usability test, the participants rated the online research guides. Overall, the online research guides were found to be difficult to use. By observing how the participants interacted with the online research guides, the author has identified several problem areas that need to be addressed.”
James Leynse for The New York Times
Martin K. Foys, a medievalist at Drew University in Madison, N.J., created a digital map of the Bayeux Tapestry.
Patricia Cohen at the New York Times writes about A Digital Key for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches. This engaging article explores how digital humanities scholars are using data and conducting research in the information age.
“Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration in the next political or philosophical “ism” and start exploring how technology is changing our understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is about method, they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have.”
“Since 2004, the annual ECAR study of undergraduate students and information technology has sought to shed light on how information technology affects the college experience. We ask students about the technology they own and how they use it in and out of their academic world. We gather information about how skilled students believe they are with technologies; how they perceive technology is affecting their learning experience; and their preferences for IT in courses.”
Jennifer Howard at Wired Campus talks with Mark McBride, Blended Librarian at Buffalo State College of the State University of New York, in A Blended Librarian Talks Information Literacy. The article discusses details of his innovative Library 300 Information Literacy course.
“So Library 300 runs more like a workshop than a sit-and-take-notes class. It doesn’t rely on real or virtual library tours but on flash drives loaded with portable applications. Students are introduced to Web apps, too, and how to use them. Part of Mr. McBride and Mr. Fujiuchi’s goal is to push students to think beyond the kinds of traditional software many are accustomed to using—although the instructors still encounter a number of students who haven’t logged much time on computers at all.”
Alex Golub, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, shares his views on The iPad for Academics at Inside Higher Ed.
“Teachers and students have always been an important market for Apple — a fact made clear by the tremendous amount of spit and polish that went into the new education website the company recently unveiled. But honestly: What do Apple’s slickly produced promo videos of adorable multicultural elementary schoolers have to do with us? And just how relevant is their newly-released iPad for what we do? Do academics really need to shell out five hundred bucks for what is essentially a big iPod touch?”
The ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee has published the 2010 top ten trends in academic libraries. This list was created based on their in-depth review of the current literature. Here are their top trends:
Academic library collection growth is driven by patron demand and will include new resource types.
Budget challenges will continue and libraries will evolve as a result.
Changes in higher education will require that librarians possess diverse skill sets.
Demands for accountability and assessment will increase.
Digitization of unique library collections will increase and require a larger share of resources.
Explosive growth of mobile devices and applications will drive new services.
Increased collaboration will expand the role of the library within the institution and beyond.
Libraries will continue to lead efforts to develop scholarly communication and intellectual property services.
Technology will continue to change services and required skills.
The definition of the library will change as physical space is repurposed and virtual space expands.
The latest issue of Educause Review focuses on cloud computing “as college and university, association, and corporate leaders discuss the opportunities/risks and the promise/peril in using cloud services”.
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