Never before has the link between a college education and postgraduate job prospects been more important. College graduates are employed more often and, on average, earn significantly more than those without college degrees. During recent years, as students have moved into a challenging job market, a college education has remained the most…

Is it legal to copy a DVD onto a school district's server? As general counsel for a company that publishes and distributes educational videos and sells video-on-demand servers that digitally deliver them to the classroom, the author gets that question from educators all the time. And the answer is: it depends. If one is dealing with copyrighted…

Books are traditionally set aside at the request of teachers from the main, normal loan collection to be put on reserve temporarily for checking out for a much shorter loan period to ensure that, at the expense of convenient, long-term loans for other users, all the students enrolled in a course have an opportunity to use them. Many studies have…

The availability and use of electronic student data systems for instructional improvement are rapidly changing. Federal, state, and district efforts to promote the use of data to improve instruction and student achievement are being accompanied by changes in teacher access to student data systems and data use. Nearly three-quarters of all teachers…

With so much interest around the use of new media, many people concerned with improving college access are striving to master this emerging set of resources in order to better reach students, who without encouragement, are unlikely to pursue higher education. But, how much do individuals understand about the way low-income, first-generation, and…

Just how much bandwidth does the average student in the United States have access to today, and how much will he or she need in the future? That depends, according to district CTOs, state technology directors, industry experts, and classroom teachers. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that 97 percent of U.S. public schools with…

Technology-savvy instructors often require students to create Web pages or videos, tasks that require finding materials such as images, music, or text on the Web, reusing them, and then republishing them in a technique that author Howard Pitler calls "remixing." However, this requires both the student and the instructor to deal with often thorny…

Reviews the history of the University of Michigan's UMLibText project that was designed to provide expanded and/or enhanced access to electronic information resources. Current holdings on the system are described; access and user support are discussed; use data and trends are examined; and future directions are considered. (Contains two…

Discusses ways to improve and standardize intellectual access to electronically published historical documents. Highlights include metadata; information retrieval; the need for user studies; the need to assess implications for change in publication management; and the need to compare empirically various technological approaches to access to…

With electronic desktop delivery of information, increased ease of access allows for greater information use than previously possible. The OhioLINK experience thus far is that improved ease of access has demonstrated the high elasticity in information usage. The first 36 months of operation of the OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center (EJC) is an…

Outlines the seven stages of the Research Activity Timeline (RAT) data collection/analysis technique which structures the research interview around a discussion of participants' current specific work projects. Illustrates the use of RAT through results of the Information Access Project, which examined the use of information technology-assisted…

A review of relevant library literature suggests that public library service to lesbian, gay, and bisexual people is poor. Offers ten suggestions to improve library services to these groups and discusses user studies; access, including classification and cataloging; library holdings; and social responsibility versus professional neutrality.…

Discusses the transition to combined print and electronic journals in the Asia-Pacific region to achieve social goals; reviews the use of Web server access logs; and presents a case study of the South Pacific Journal of Psychology to illustrate the utility of access log analysis for evaluating the economic and social goals of electronic…

Discussion of information retrieval highlights DalText, a prototype information retrieval system that provides access to nonindexed textual data files where the mode of access is determined by the user based on the task at hand. A user study is described that was conducted at Dalhousie University (Nova Scotia) to test DalText. (Contains 23…

Examines influences on the use of electronic information resources, including the Internet. Highlights include information quality and accessibility; the Technology Assessment Model; the Fitness for Purpose model; the Theory of Planned Behavior; and a study in Australia that compared the ability of these models to explain electronic information…