Archive for the ‘Academic Library’ Category

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:

1. Expanding university apps and mobile web
2. Nomadic learning
3. Augmented reality learning scenarios
4. Mobile apps for education
5. Twitter feedback in class

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

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:

1. Virtual Tours
2. School Pride
3. School Swag
4. Alumni Groups
5. Sharing Department Content
6. Reaching Out to Prospective Students
7. Facebook Places Advertising

The folks at Accredited Online Colleges have put together a mega-list of 40 Cool Ways College Libraries Are Leveraging Social Media. Here are just a few of the projects which made the list:

• Facebook photo contest:
  Fairfield University’s library sponsored a library photo contest for National Library week that built their Facebook following.
• Displaying new acquisitions:
  Utah Valley University’s library uses Shelfari to show off new acquisitions.
• 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
• Reviewing Risks to Information Security
• Shared Assessments

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.”