up2date

arXiv will continue, thanks to grant

A few announcements of the good news that arXiv has found sufficient funding to continue :

LJ's infoDOCKET edits and presents the Cornell UL press release.

The Chronicle's Wired Campus also writes up the story : "New Grant and Governance Structure Will Help Support arXiv."

It's good news for Open Access fans and for those supporting library publishing and archiving initiatives.

College student 'mindset list'

Ah, time to feel old again, thanks to the Beloit mindset list (HT Inside HigherEd). The ones that hit home this year :

• They have never seen an airplane “ticket.”
• They can’t picture people actually carrying luggage through airports rather than rolling it.
• Star Wars has always been just a film, not a defense strategy.
• They watch television everywhere but on a television.

"Eye-Tracking Study Finds Students’ Attentiveness Depends on Location, Location, Location"

I found this an interesting article in the Chronicle's Wired Campus. Definitely something that needs more & more intensive study, though, to prove anything or change teaching methods (IMHO).

"The conventional wisdom among educators that students’ attention tends to drift off after 15 minutes is wrong, according to a new study conducted with eye-tracking devices.

The study, conducted by David Rosengrant, an assistant professor of physics education at Kennesaw State University, found no pattern in when students become distracted. Instead, students’ focus waxes and wanes throughout a lecture and is strongly affected by factors such as where in the lecture hall the student is sitting.

..."

JSTOR Adds “Institution Finder”

LJ's infoDOCKET remarks : "The Institution Finder is located on JSTOR’s public login page on the web."

 

HathiTrust update on copyright

I'm happy to see the all-to-rare acknowledgement of other jurisdictions' copyright rules from June's Hathi Trust update :

New Copyright Status (IC-US)

Michigan staff completed the majority of development necessary to support a new rights status in HathiTrust Web applications. The status will apply to works that were restored to being in copyright in the United States by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), but are now in the public domain in the rest of the world. An increasing number of these volumes are being identified as part of CRMS-World, the IMLS-funded continuation of the CRMS project.

UBorrow wins 2012 Innovation Award

From LJ's infoDOCKET :

CIC’s UBorrow wins The Rethinking Resource Sharing Initiative’s 2012 Innovation Award

From CIC (Committee on Institutional Cooperation): The Rethinking Resource Sharing Initiative has announced that the winner of the Rethinking Resource Sharing (RRS) 2012 Innovation Award is UBorrow, a project of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. This award comes with a $1000 stipend, and honors individuals or institutions for changes they have made to improve users’ access to information through resource sharing in their library, consortium, state or country.

...

Google & the Symantic Web

Apparently I read the wrong blogs, as the first hint of the "Google Knowledge Graph" came from enssib & Abondance actualité. This new Google project touts itself as "a huge collection of the people, places and things in the world and how they're connected to one another.

This is how we’ll be able to tell if your search for “mercury” refers to the planet or the chemical element--and also how we can get you smarter answers to jump start your discovery."

New issue : D-Lib

(Thanks to LJ's infoDOCKET). The article that struck me as looking particularly interesting was

Implementing DOIs for Research Data
Article by Natasha Simons, Griffith University, Australia.

Google Scholar has a 'new look'

From the Google Scholar blog :

"We've made several adjustments based on feedback from the legal search user survey...You can limit your search to specific jurisdictions by clicking in the sidebar of the search results page instead of navigating through advanced search. You can print legal cases in a cleaner, more streamlined format using the "Print" option in your browser.

We've also clarified the ... settings page by organizing it into sections, performed a minor facelift on pages that deal with configuration of email alerts, and next we'll be working on updating the author profile pages and help pages.

As announced last summer, we're unable to continue supporting older and infrequently used versions of Firefox (<3.6) and Internet Explorer (<7)....

If you don't like our new modern look, or simply prefer to wait a little longer before switching, you can temporarily revert to the old venerable look. ...

If you're wondering why you're still seeing the old look, that's probably because we're gradually rolling out the new look to all users. But you don't have to wait. You can beat the crowds and upgrade right away."

New Online Archive of 120 Historical Films

Thanks to LJ's infoDOCKET :

From a British Council Announcement:

Over 120 films providing fascinating snapshots of the UK’s cultural, sporting, industrial and political heritage have been launched online to the public thanks to funding from Google and the British Council.

The films [...date...] back to late 1939 – and give an insight not only into a bygone age, but also serve to capture how cultural relations has changed. For several decades, the Council was an enthusiastic commissioner and distributor of documentaries, designed to showcase Britain to the outside world and promote democratic values at a time when fascism was spreading across Europe. The films were largely shown at embassies, consulates and to students and schoolchildren around the world.

[Clip]

...The films are now available to the public to stream and download for the first time at http://film.britishcouncil.org/british-council-film-collection.

[Clip]

... Briony Hanson, the British Council’s Director of Film, said: “... With our self image very much in the spotlight again this summer as the world watches the Olympics and the Jubilee, these films encourage us to ask timely questions about what it means to be British.”

Direct to Film Collection

Direct to a Collection of Stills from Some of the Films (via Flickr)

Read the Complete Announcement (Includes a List of Highlights)