Given the abundance of open education initiatives that aim to make educational assets freely available online, the time seems ripe to explore the potential of open education to transform the economics and ecology of education. Despite the diversity of tools and resources already available--from well-packaged course materials to simple games, for…

Eighteen scholarly papers and eighteen abstracts comprise the content of the 8th "Brick and Click Libraries Symposium," held annually at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. The proceedings, authored by academic librarians and presented at the symposium, portray the contemporary and future face of librarianship. Many of the…

Storing and curating authentic academic literature and making it accessible for the long term has been a time-honoured task of national libraries. By guarding existing knowledge and facilitating its use to produce new insights, national and university libraries have formed an integral part of the research environment, complementing the roles of…

ALI is a project to develop an archive for talking books produced by the Swedish universities. The universities produce talking books from the mandatory literature for students with reading disabilities, including mostly journal articles, book chapters and texts written by teachers. The project group consists of librarians and co-ordinators for…

The University of York is among the top universities in the United Kingdom, yet has not adopted all manner of electronic media. The University Library attempts to meet the demands placed upon it by its academic and student users for electronic media of all kinds, while working within a sometimes frame work that does not encourage exploitation of…

Digital publishing is a field lurching along many paths and alleyways of experimentation. For their potential influence, however, recent approaches bear watching. In this article, the author shares the story of Jason on his personal decision-making struggles on using digital versions against conventional textbooks. The author also discusses…

Librarians and archivists find themselves facing the prospect of digitization. Everyone is doing it, everyone needs it. Discussions rage nationally and internationally concerning what to digitize and the best means to present and retain digital objects. Digitization is the act of making something digital, expressing a physical object "in numerical…

MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) is a web-based open resource designed primarily for faculty and students in higher education. The resources in MERLOT include over 8,000 learning materials and support materials from a wide variety of disciplines that can be integrated within the context of a larger course.…

Discusses the nature of scholarship as it has been known and the characteristics of the traditional relationship between scholars and their information sources. Also discusses three generations of library computing, organizational issues surrounding the advent of the "wired scholar," and implications for the future. (JN)

The objective of this study was to gain enough familiarity with developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies to be able to advise the information service community on what can be applied today and what one might reasonably expect to be applicable to library and information services in the near future. The emphasis is on…

This paper describes the progress made under the ELISE II electronic image library project from a technical standpoint. The ELISE II project is a European-wide initiative that aims to provide a comprehensive electronic image library service for Europe. It is funded under the European Commission, DG XIII-E, Telematics for Libraries Initiative. The…

This paper looks at the importance of librarians with the current availability of online information. The first section summarizes the author's observations of online research in special libraries in the 1980s. The second section presents his observations of the current situation, using examples from the Los Angeles Times Editorial Library,…

As use of the Internet grows as a research tool, patrons have become increasingly less dependent on librarians and other expert intermediaries. Examining the quality of on-line searches, this paper argues that researchers and other Internet users do not look for and hence do not find the best resources. For two days in early November 1998, all…

As in past years, this 17th volume of "Advances in Library Administration and Organization" brings together a number of articles relating to issues that affect the lives of library managers. Articles include: "Promotion and Tenure for Academic Librarians: Current Practices at Selected Institutions" (W. Bede Mitchell); "The Relationship between…

A new Danish act regarding library service has initiated several projects in order to promote libraries and to provide library staff experience in using the Internet to communicate with end users. Most public Danish information is found on official World Wide Web sites, and there is a tendency to publish online versions instead of printed…