Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a conversation with faculty in the library and in other academic departments about undergraduate research assignments. We discussed some of the stumbling blocks that our students seem to face, especially as they search for sources for their papers. It’s hard for us to put ourselves back [...]

If you were saving some of your budget to purchase the next print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, I have some bad news for you. Yesterday the editors announced that after 244 years of publication, they are going to stop printing bound volumes and instead will focus on digital editions. This decision is not altogether [...]

Robert Darnton gave a talk at my institution last week about the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). He presented a progress report, the details of which he has outlined in the New York Review of Books. The first prototype of the DPLA, using technology developed in the project’s “Beta Sprint” competition, should be released [...]

Two weeks ago I attended the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) meeting in Austin, Texas. EDUCAUSE is focused on furthering higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. ELI is an EDUCAUSE community dedicated to the development of learning through technology innovation. This was my first EDUCAUSE conference and it was exciting to attend [...]