Librarian Shannon's List: Digital Scholarhip

"This paper describes the process whereby a university library investigated the value of its subject guides to its users. A literature review and surveys of library staff, library users and other libraries were carried out. Existing library subject guides and those of other higher education libraries were evaluated. The project team reported regularly to the wider library team throughout the year long investigation and made recommendations. The project served to develop the professional skills of the project team, to expand the knowledge of the wider library team and encouraged new ways of thinking about guide provision to users."

"Welcome to the IL OER wiki! This wiki was set up by Nancy Graham and Jane Secker as part of our attempts to build a community of practice for sharing information literacy teaching and learning materials as open educational resources.
 
The site includes:
A list of OER initiatives
Information about recent and past events on this topic
Details about how to get involved
 
We have also set up a JISCMAIL list (IL-OERS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK) to support this work, so please do consider joining the list."

Project Information Literacy (PIL) is a public benefit nonprofit dedicated to conducting ongoing, large-scale research about early adults and their research habits. We are currently collecting data from early adults enrolled in community colleges and public and private colleges and universities in the U.S. Our goal is to understand how early adults conceptualize and operationalize research activities for course work and "everyday life" use and especially how they resolve issues of credibility, authority, relevance, and currency in the digital age.

SCRLC is pleased to bring you some of the presentations and information from workshops we have sponsored.

Wikibooks is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit.

The National Academies Press (NAP) was created by the National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States. The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and health, capturing the most authoritative views on important issues in science and health policy. The institutions represented by the NAP are unique in that they attract the nation’s leading experts in every field to serve on their award-wining panels and committees. The nation turns to the work of NAP for definitive information on everything from space science to animal nutrition.

The project will create open content electronic textbooks that will be freely available from a website. Distribution will also be possible via paper, CD, or DVD. Our goal initially is to focus on content development and Web distribution, and we will work with relevant authorities to facilitate dissemination by other means when bandwidth is unavailable or inadequate. The goal is to make textbooks available to the many who cannot afford them.

We are the world's largest publisher of free and open college textbooks. With our ever-expanding catalog of top quality books by expert authors, now is your chance to be a hero and help your students save thousands of dollars. Get started today and join the textbook affordability movement.

If you're an educator at a university, college, or K-12 school, now you have an easy way to design and distribute complete courses featuring audio, video, books, and other content. And students and lifelong learners can experience your courses for free through a powerful new app for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.

The National Repository of Online Courses (NROC) is a growing library of high-quality online course content for students and faculty in higher education, high school and Advanced Placement*.

With over 3,200 videos on everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice, we're on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace.

Offering free online classes and in-depth online learning, Academic Earth brings courses online so everyone can receive a world-class education from the world's leading scholars without being restricted by physical boundaries. We focus on providing a user-friendly educational ecosystem where you can easily navigate through the free online courses to find the exact online class video to watch, interact with and gain knowledge from. With all the available classes online, why are we the top provider of education online? It is because we pair up with top national universities to bring you the top lectures in a variety of subjects in an online community that makes learning from online classes easier and more successful for everyone.

Saylor.org is a free and open collection of college level courses. There are no registrations or fees required to take our courses, and you will earn a certificate upon completion of each course. Because we are not accredited, you will not earn a college degree or diploma; however, our team of experienced college professors has designed each course so you will be able to achieve the same learning objectives as students enrolled in traditional colleges. 

The Open Course Library is a collection of expertly developed educational materials - including textbooks, syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments - for 81 high-enrollment college courses. 42 courses have been completed so far, providing faculty with a high-quality, affordable option that will cost students no more than $30 for textbooks. All materials are shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY) license unless otherwise noted.

MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses for free to a virtual community of learners around the world. It will also enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences.

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.

New technologies, an expanding universe of knowledge, and a more 
sophisticated user base influence not only how we provide access to 
information, but also how we define and organize ourselves in relation 
to the public. The J. Murrey Atkins Library of the University of North 
Carolina at Charlotte has endeavored to strengthen the relationship 
between the library and the teaching faculty by restructuring the library's 
liaison program. Concurrently, but independent of this redesign, three 
experienced reference librarians assessed their effectiveness as liai­
sons by conducting a survey of selected departments. A review of the 
development and implementation of the library's program, together with 
an assessment of the faculty survey, confirm that specific elements are 
prerequisites of an effective liaison program.

The Hedgehog Review publishes insightful essays and reviews by scholars and cultural critics focused on the most important questions of our day:
What does it mean to be human?
How do we live with our deepest differences?
What is the good life? The good community? The good world?

This article is the first of three in an exploratory study of the cross-cultural, cross-language information-seeking (IS) behavior of a group of eighty-four academic and public reference librarians from Egypt and the USA. The present article describes the design of the cross-cultural research instrument used to record the behavior of participants when presented with a choice of information resources in several languages unfamiliar to them. A review of literature demonstrates the need in cross-cultural investigations for a multi-tiered approach that allows analysis from different perspectives. A detailed description of the design rationale for the interview model is given, which includes a cultural background questionnaire providing data designed to enable comparative analysis of the search performance of sub-groups. Instructions on how to manage cross-language searches complete the interview. A discussion of the usefulness of the methodology in discerning cultural universals, differences, and the IS needs of cross-cultural researchers is followed by conclusions and suggestions for further research.

Adobe has just published a global study on creativity. The research shows 8 in 10 people feel that unlocking creativity is critical to economic growth and nearly two-thirds of respondents feel creativity is valuable to society, yet a striking minority - only 1 in 4 people - believe they are living up to their own creative potential.

Interviews of 5,000 adults across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Japan expose surprising attitudes and beliefs about creativity, providing new insights into the role of creativity in business, education and society overall.