The spread of a seemingly playful alternative to traditional diplomas, inspired by Boy Scout achievement patches and video-game power-ups, suggests that the standard certification system no longer works in today's fast-changing job market. Educational upstarts across the Web are adopting systems of "badges" to certify skills and abilities.…

Early this decade, the number of Web-based documents stored on the servers of the University of Florida hovered near 300,000. By the end of 2006, that number had leapt to four million. Two years later, the university hosts close to eight million Web documents. Web sites for colleges and universities everywhere have become repositories for data…

In this article, the author discusses a mutilation that he has encountered involving Google Book Search. That massive text-digitization project, working in collaboration with several of the world's most important library collections, has now made available, in both PDF and text view, tens of thousands of 19th-century titles while it awaits the…

Jokes about "Dark Angel" and "Blackborg" surfaced almost immediately after Blackboard Inc. announced its plan to buy course-management software competitor Angel Learning, the author reports. Angel had lured away dozens of Blackboard clients in recent years with a friendly, approachable corporate culture that stood in sharp contrast to Blackboard's…

At least 18 colleges are scrambling to inform tens of thousands of students that they are at risk of having their identities stolen after SunGard, a leading software vendor, reported that a laptop owned by one of its consultants was stolen. The extent of the problem is still unknown, though many of the campuses that have been identified are in…

The Online Computer Library Center, which provides catalogs and interlibrary loan services to most of the nation's libraries, is approaching a financial crossroads and must decide whether to diversify or cut back services. One option would serve academic and research libraries better; the other option would serve public libraries better. (MSE)