Changes at Google Scholar: A Conversation With Anurag Acharya

In its own quiet way, Google Scholar has become a major force in scholarly communication. For many researchers, faculty, and students, it is the first search tool used, challenging the popularity and utility of veteran databases licensed—often at considerable cost—by academic and corporate libraries. Yet announcements about changes in the constantly evolving service seem to occur rarely and with little ballyhoo. For example, did you know that Google Scholar has launched its own digitization project, separate from the high-profile Google Book Search mass digitization? Or what about the new Key Author feature? Continue reading Changes at Google Scholar: A Conversation With Anurag Acharya…

Colleges stress moral leadership

Ethical lapses in society are prompting universities to try to turn out students who are more socially responsible.
By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Higher education’s mission has always stretched beyond academics. But how do colleges make concrete the stuff of vision statements?

Motivated in part by concerns about student cheating and broader ethical lapses in society, colleges and universities are increasingly exploring ways to prepare students to be moral exemplars and socially responsible leaders. As the world becomes more interconnected, they’re also stepping up efforts to turn out graduates who are engaged global citizens. For example:

•At William Jewell College in Liberty, Mo., students can now turn the required core liberal arts curriculum into a major by completing three “applied learning experiences” such as service learning, study abroad, and leadership on or off campus.

•Duke University in Durham, N.C., is in the pilot phase of a $30 million endowed program known as DukeEngage. The college will fund students’ service projects for a semester or a summer and connect them with faculty and career counselors to integrate what they’re learning into their overall education. Continue reading Colleges stress moral leadership…

How Dartmouth Produces Video Podcasts

By Dian Schaffhauser

With an $8,000 investment, Dartmouth’s Department of Physics and Astronomy has set up the capability to provide video podcasts for courses that enable students to watch lectures they may have missed or that warrant review. Now, said Lab Manager John Largent, the New Hampshire school is exploring how it can make lecture capture available campus-wide.

Up until the summer of 2004, only a single professor in the department was in the practice of making one of his courses available for viewing after class. The media format was videotape, which had to be checked out from the library.

Video Capture Technology
With seed money in hand and based on the recommendation of other AV groups on campus, Largent invested in a Canon GL2 camcorder. But its MiniDV tape limited him to a single hour of recording time, Continue reading How Dartmouth Produces Video Podcasts…

Beyond Google: How do students conduct academic research?

Available through First Monday. Here is the abstract:
This paper reports findings from an exploratory study about how students majoring in humanities and social sciences use the Internet and library resources for research. Using student discussion groups, content analysis, and a student survey, our results suggest students may not be as reliant on public Internet sites as previous research has reported. Instead, students in our study used a hybrid approach for conducting course–related research. A majority of students leveraged both online and offline sources to overcome challenges with finding, selecting, and evaluating resources and gauging professors’ expectations for quality research.
you can find the rest of it here

Gale Adds Custom Search RSS Feeds

Databases using the Gale PowerSearch interface now offer custom search RSS feeds. Paul R. Pival has a good write-up on The Distant Librarian.
Thanks to TheLibrarianInBlack for the post.

Eden Prairie Library Contest Entry on YouTube

I thought this was pretty dang funny.

Look at this interesting post from The Other Librarian on web 2.0–

We Asked For 2.0 Libraries & We Got 2.0 Librarians

Gaming, Learning and Libraries Symposium

ALA has made all of the podcasts from the GL&L Symposium available free! You can find them here at the ALA TechSource Blog.

The Spring/Summer 2007 Educators’ Spotlight Digest

The Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Educators’ Spotlight Digest (ESD), the
free
online publication of S.O.S. for Information Literacy, is now available
at:

http://www.sosspotlight.org

This issue’s College Connection column - “Academic Libraries and Shared
Reading Programs” - highlights several university-based shared reading
programs and their special offerings, including areas where librarians
collaborate with faculty and others to promote information literacy.

Other stories include: Continue reading The Spring/Summer 2007 Educators’ Spotlight Digest…

Primo Site of the Month

The Peer-Reviewed Instructional Materials Online (PRIMO) Committee of
the Instruction Section of ACRL is pleased to announce that a new Site
of the Month interview for June 2007 has been posted to our committee
website. To read the full interview and to browse the archive of
previous profiles, please see here

*** PRIMO Site of the Month Interview, June 2007***Research 101
http://www.lib.washington.edu/uwill/research101/

Interview with John W. Holmes
Odegaard Undergraduate Library, University of Washington
Interviewer: Marie-Elise Waltz

Description: Research 101 is designed as a basic library tutorial for
use in any academic institution, although the examples used relate to
the University of Washington Libraries collection. The tutorial has six
sections: The Basics, Info Cycles, Topics, Searching, Finding, and
Evaluating. Continue reading Primo Site of the Month…