A New Courseware Trend?
This news item caught my eye. It announces an agreement between Blackboard and NBC in which the former will now offer access to the latter’s content. It states:
Blackboard is providing academic users with access to historical multimedia resources from NBC Learn. The two companies today announced that that they’ve inked a deal to make historical and current events materials from NBC News accessible within the Blackboard Learn platform. Through NBC News Archives on Demand, college and university students and faculty will have access to thousands of video and audio files, as well as textual materials, covering a wide range of topics, from politics to health.
The details indicate that there is only a free building block that enables access to the NBC News Archive. There is a fee for the content. But we’re already paying hefty fees for access to text and multimedia news content found in any number of library databases. I wonder if this is the start of some sort of trend where content providers of all types, including the traditional library database producers, will seek partnerships with Blackboard and other courseware vendors to integrate their content directly into the product. That would raise an interesting question about who would pay for it, and what access options would be possible. To some extent, academic librarians are working to integrate the library content into courseware. Perhaps this just takes it to the next level. The question is, as the traditional campus negotiator for and provider of research content, how do we fit into this scenario?
How Do Your Meeting Rooms Smell?
I had to chuckle when I came across Acadamit’s advice to new colleagues to avoid meetings scheduled for the campus library:
Do not attend any meeting being held at the library. Those conference rooms always smell mildly of piss, the chairs are uncomfortable, and the coffee shop makes terrible coffee.
Our stacks supervisor once reported an oddly yellowish, wet stain among the book shelves that gave off a quite foul odor. We wondered if a student had brought a dog into the library or whether someone’s small child had an accident of some sort. We never did unravel this mystery. But as far as library meeting rooms that smell like a rarely traversed subway concourse (you city dwellers know what I mean), that’s a new one for me. Better perform a smell check on your meeting rooms – and keep a bottle of Lysol handy just in case – or a container of your cafe’s coffee. That might make a pretty powerful disinfectant as well.
ALA DIS-Connect?
A colleague with whom I serve on an ACRL committee made an interesting comment about doing our committee work on ALA Connect, the relatively new community for ALA members. While you can find and link with friends or create you own sub-community (like this one for ALA members who love cats) most of my interaction with the system has involved committee activity. On one hand the system succeeds because it does provide a platform for communicating with fellow committee members. There’s no need to set up an email distribution list; just post your message and it goes to all committee members. If you have a document to share, you can upload and attach it to your message. If fellow members want to reply, they need to log in to Connect. That’s what my colleague pointed out. We were pondering why so few of our fellow committee members commented on a document we shared. He pointed out that when he served on the committee two years ago, there was great interaction on the committee with lots of exchanges. Now you might say that a different set of people will respond differently. Or you might say that creating a barrier, such as having to log in to ALA Connect anytime you want to add your voice to a conversation, could potentially reduce committee discussion. I did point out that all members get an email with a direct link to the committee community, so it’s not that hard to respond to a colleague. Still, you need to log in first, and then you can reply to a posting. That’s not much of a hurdle to jump, but it might be just enough to discourage someone’s desire to connect. What do you think of ALA Connect? Has it impacted your participation for better or worse?
Interesting development with content providers selling through BB. I suspect that the “who will pay” question could be answers with “as many people as possible, for the same content multiple times.” For years EBSCO and InfoTrac have bundled database content with textbooks and this content is marketed as a wonderful add-on to the textbook. Of course the student gets to pay for what the library already licensed for them and the student is steered away from the library. But a busy adjunct (and adjuncts are now over half our faculty) might find it a lot easier to stick with what comes with the textbook and not bother trying to include broader information literacy instruction into their courses.
I hope campuses reject this practice in which it would be really easy to neglect library resources and pay twice for the same stuff (that is limited to when you’re enrolled in the course, I suppose? Not available if you’re taking a course where the professor doesn’t use BB?) All the more reason libraries need to be involved in how decisions are made about CMSs.
Regarding the Blackboard/NBC thing, at the college where I work the online courses have access to a HUGE repository of streaming media that is not accessible to students not taking online courses, and the library is essentially cut out. I won’t got into detail here, but it throws library initiatives toward licensing streaming media through a loop.