Paul Streby's Library tagged no_tag →  View Popular

Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost.

A new UK report on the habits of the "Google Generation" finds that kids born since 1993 aren't quite the Internet super-sleuths they're sometimes made out to be. For instance, are teens better with technology than older adults? Perhaps, but they also "tend to use much simpler applications and fewer facilities than many imagine."

The report (PDF), sponsored by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee, tries to get beyond the stereotypes to find out just how good young people are with information technology, and what the implications are for schools and libraries. Based on log analysis from British Library web sites and search tools, along with a "virtual" longitudinal study based on literature reviews from the past 30 years, the report explodes a number of myths about students today.

MITECS online is available as an Abstracts-only
version to the general public. Readers who have bought the book will
be given access to a fulltext version of MITECS, which has a number of
features complementary to the printed book. First, it is fully
searchable; simply type in the word or phrase desired in the box at
left. Second, the site contains dynamic links between related
articles. Third, and perhaps most useful of all, the site will house a
growing colleciton of links to other cognitive science resources on
the web, thus creating a core reference resource for the extended
community. Individual articles will provide links relevant to their
specific topic, while the introductions to the six sections will list
links to sites containing resources and further information on that
domain.

Library/Institutional Site License Available