"Rent or buy?" is a question people ask about everything from housing to textbooks. It is also a question universities must consider when it comes to high-performance computing (HPC). With the advent of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft Windows HPC Server, Rackspace's OpenStack, and other cloud-based services, researchers now have…

Purpose: Online information vendors currently offer a variety of additional services; among these are alert services which present requested information on recent publications to registered users. This paper aims to investigate a variety of alert services provided by four online information vendors. Design/methodology/approach: A comparison of the…

Deciding whether to go with a particular open source product is an exercise in risk management: understanding the risks of one's possible actions and choices, calculating when a certain level of risk is appropriate to reach a desired outcome, and planning for how to handle negative outcomes. To be sure, opting to go with a particular proprietary…

Conventional and hosted applications thrive, but open source ERP (enterprise resource planning) is coming on strong. In many ways, the evolution of the ERP market is littered with ironies. When Oracle began buying up customer relationship management (CRM) and ERP companies, some universities worried that they would be left with fewer choices and…

A combination of content creators, online vendors, other intermediaries, and librarians work to bring online information sources to end users. Although these interconnected parts are sometimes adversarial, the current information marketplace relies on interaction among them all. People have wondered what it is like on the other side. The author…

Discusses the liability of online information services and presents a study of case law in Europe and in the United States that deals with liability for the provision of inaccurate, incomplete, or out-of-date information. Liability in tort, contractual liability, and strict liability are examined. (18 references) (LRW)

Since 1982, the Quality Assurance Committee of the New England Online Users Group (NENON) has focused on communicating online searchers' problems to system vendors and database producers, primarily by distributing check-off and fill-in-the-blank forms to NENON members, collecting and tabulating the forms, and forwarding them to the vendors and…

Discusses the information needs of Congress and the use of online databases by librarians, analysts, and staffers to meet those needs. The features of online services that are particularly appropriate for responding to the needs of Congress are identified and possible future trends are explored. (one reference) (CLB)

Provides brief reviews of the sites for several online services of the World Wide Web; the Web as a marketing tool and other aspects of interest to information professionals are highlighted. A sidebar presents information on accessing Internet locations, graphics, online forms, Telnet, saving, printing, mailing, and searching. (AEF)

This digest highlights features of the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), explains how to use the system most effectively, and offers suggestions on how teacher education faculty can present and use the ERIC system to supplement classroom instruction. Following a description of how resources in ERIC can be helpful to teachers and…

Summarizes presentations on profitability in the information industry from the viewpoints of producers, who have to have a reason to be in business, and users, whose businesses are often driven by the information they can access and the price of that information. (Author/CLB)

More than 40 leading computer and telephony companies have united to lead the charge toward open standards and universal interoperability for Internet telephony products. The voice of IP Forum (VoIP) is working to define technical guidelines for two-party, real-time communications over IP networks, including provisions for compatibility with…

Lists 10 questions that should be asked when evaluating a new scientific information provider, and discusses how to make a decision after the questions are answered. (Author/PEN)

Highlights points to consider when choosing an Internet Service Provider. Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) and Point to Point Protocol (PPP) are compared regarding price, performance, bandwidth, speed, and technical support. Obtaining access via local, national, consumer online, and telephone-company providers is discussed. A pricing chart and…

Examines whether pricing Internet goods and services can adapt in real time to variations in the demand for different goods and services, so that revenue to the publishers and providers is increased. Establishes that presenting two test prices to 20 or 25 customers each will generate data which permit achievement of a high proportion of the…