Archival outreach, an essential activity for any repository, should focus on what constituents are already doing and capitalize on existing venues related to the repository's subject area. The Water Resources Archive at Colorado State University successfully undertook this integrative approach to outreach. Detailed in the article are outreach…

Over the years, the author has discovered that learning how to write mini-grants helped him transition to writing successful major grants. In applying for a mini-grant, the author thinks of any grant going under $5,000. The important thing to understand is that many, many corporations and foundations have mini-grant programs. Accessing the…

Hurricane Katrina caused immense upheaval and disrupted many lives. Among those affected were pregnant women. A public service announcement, website content, and a fact sheet were developed to inform pregnant women about the issues that could potentially affect their health and that of their babies. The aim of these products was to provide health…

This article profiles Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt's new course, "Travel and Transformation in the Early 17th Century." The product of an intense, months-long collaboration between computing specialists, graduate students, librarians, and scholars, the course makes innovative use of all the tools and technical know-how a major university…

"Future" often conjures up something far off. Library media specialists come to realize that the future is often much closer than they think. Web 2.0 technologies have swiftly taken library media specialists into a whole new realm of possibilities. No longer consumers, they have the opportunity to become producers of information and collaborators…

The Understanding Evolution website (http://evolution.berkeley.edu/) was developed to provide a freely accessible resource that promotes the teaching of evolution and improved understandings of evolution among students and the general public. Evaluations show that the strategies employed in site design have allowed it to effectively meet those…

Purpose: We used data from a large sample of nursing homes to examine the association between staff turnover and quality. Design and Methods: The staff turnover measures came from primary data collected from 2,840 nursing homes in 2004 (representing a 71% response rate). Data collection included measures for nurse aides, licensed practical nurses,…

The tradition of Thanksgiving in America dates back to 1621 when the Pilgrims were virtually starving. Nowadays, Americans celebrate this event by eating more than they need and giving some thoughts to the blessings they had for the past year. Many of today's children are not accustomed to how it feels to be hungry, although many experience it on…

Building on McMillan's two-way model of interactivity, this study presents a three-way model of interactive communication, which is used to assess political Web sites' progress toward the ideals of cyberdemocracy and the fostering of public deliberation. Results of a 3-year study of state legislature Web sites, an analysis of the community…

The Internet can be a tremendous aid to research, information sharing, and social networking, but it also raises Murphy's Law to new heights: If anything can go wrong online, it will. And when it goes wrong, educators' jobs and reputations are sometimes at risk. For example, there is the former student teacher in Pennsylvania who filed a federal…

Darren Crovitz explains that the explosive growth of Web-based content and communication in recent years compels us to teach students how to examine the "rhetorical nature and ethical dimensions of the online world." He demonstrates successful approaches to accomplish this goal through his analysis of the selling techniques of two Web sites…

Traditional library web products, whether online public access catalogs, library databases, or even library web sites, have long been rigidly controlled and difficult to use. Patrons regularly prefer Google's simple interface. Now social bookmarking and tagging tools help librarians bridge the gap between the library's need to offer authoritative,…

Blogs, which began as a way to easily post one's thoughts online in print, have evolved to include multimedia capabilities. A blog is not limited to text--audio and video can be incorporated. A video blog (commonly called a vlog) is a blog that uses video in its posts. People who create vlogs are vloggers, and the worldwide community of vlogs and…

Keying in the search term "Martin Luther King" on Google would result in retrieving martinlutherking.com as the topmost hit. At first glance, it seems like a neutral informational site, but clicking on a few articles will unmask the hate. This site, which is owned by Don Black, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, references King as a…

The authors who happened to be moderators of academic online discussions bring tales from the trenches. Whether it's computational chemistry, the history of the book, or women's studies, the technology and the users can both prove difficult. The first author talks about two scholarly discussion lists. SHARP-L, whose name comes from the Society for…