Visual ethnographers increasingly use hypermedia for research, representation and teaching and learning. This article discusses these uses by reflecting on Visualising ethnography, a teaching and learning 'gateway' web site about the visual in the ethnographic process housing interviews, authored works, exhibitions, introductory texts and links.…

Purpose: Aims to investigate the impact of the internet on reference services in public libraries in England. Design/methodology/approach: A literature review provides the policy context for UK public library services and highlights developments in digital reference. A questionnaire was administered in 2003 to a sample of the public library…

All the articles in this collection share at least three common features. First, they all give a narrative account of a change that took place within an activity system; in this, they follow Vygotsky's (1978) injunction to investigate the history of the system in order to understand its "causal dynamic basis" (p. 62). Second, in so doing, they…

This article presents four projects geared towards providing the community of EAD users with methods and tools to control the quality of archival finding aids, to extract metadata from them in Dublin Core and qualified Dublin Core for use in OAI-PMH repositories, and to publish them on the Web along with the digital images produced by digitization…

The Digital Divide is alive and well in America. What this means is the technology haves and the have-nots are continually growing further apart. Due to the pace of change in the field of computer technology, this divide widens faster in less time. Playing catch-up becomes an increasingly more difficult game to endure, with the government, public,…

Online instruction has grown about as much as it possibly can within current educational structures. Educators are at the point where something has to give: Either schools will stay the same and leave online efforts at a standstill, or educators' concept of school will change and allow online instruction to grow. The primary obstacle to growth is…

Purpose: To illustrate the need for social network metadata within semantic metadata. Design/methodology/approach: Surveys properties of social networks and the semantic web, suggests that social network analysis applies to semantic content, argues that semantic content is more searchable if social network metadata is merged with semantic web…

Arguments about whether or not the Internet is creating new people or simply helping us to see ourselves in new ways are threaded through the literature on digital culture. People make new technology and exploit it for their own purposes and so it is reasonable to suggest that any changes in our social identities are wider in their reach than the…

The global nature of the new information and communication network has been questioned because of the obvious exclusion of developing countries in the development of the contemporary structure. Leaving aside the troublesome term "developing countries", it is still very obvious that the poorer southern countries are in a different…

When dealing with First Amendment free speech issues in the context of public libraries, courts have merely cited the supposition that constitutional public forum analysis leads to the conclusion that the public library is a limited public forum for the purposes of First Amendment analysis. By focusing narrowly on the issue of whether Internet…

A decade after passage of the Government Printing Office Electronic Information Access Enhancement Act of 1993, a pilot study at the University of Arizona examined the impact of one selective depository library's decision to select, whenever possible, Web-based government information instead of tangible formats such as print and microfiche. The…

Using the World Wide Web (hereinafter the "Web") has become an increasingly viable way to source information in academic writing. However, the Web is a fundamentally different type of resource from conventional sources such as books and journals. This paper argues that there is a need among learners for a heightened critical awareness of…

To use the Internet effectively, students need to be taught critical evaluation skills that they can apply to each Web site they use for research. The action research report discussed in this article exemplifies the collaborative teamwork involved in creating a critical-evaluation unit for Internet sites to be used with middle school students.

This article reports, that in a growing number of districts, school leaders are ranking the threat of sex offenders-some of them the parents of enrolled students--as one of their chief student-safety concerns. That threat, they say, is a primary reason for investing thousands of dollars in a Web-based tracking system that tells school officials if…

If technology can affect student learning, shouldn't it be considered in making decisions? Data-driven decision making models include data from curriculum, instruction, test scores, lunch programs, budgets, and transportation. None of the current models include anything about technology. The challenge with any type of data-driven decision making…