Sustainability of Digitized Special Collections
As libraries continue to digitize special collections, ARL and Ithaka S+R have released a report Appraising our Digital Investment: Sustainability of Digitized Special Collections in ARL Libraries (PDF) that offers a snapshot of research libraries digitization efforts.
The research reveals that understanding the continuing costs for sustaining digital collections is a challenge across libraries. Responsibility is frequently dispersed among departments, and staff time and other costs are rarely allocated expressly to these activities or accounted for project-by-project. Almost universally, libraries are funding this activity out of their base budgets, suggesting that they will continue to need to shift funds from other things in order to support this as a priority.
Scrible Student Edition
Scrible, the web annotation startup, has launched a student edition of their service. While students will be able to create citations, summaries, and shareable libraries, it’s unclear why students would not opt to use Zotero or Mendeley instead.
Digital Scholarship and Collaboration
Adrianne Wadewitz (@wadewitz) explores how “how one develops as a scholar and a professional academic in a digital humanities postdoc at a liberal arts institution,” and examines the need for collaboration when doing digital scholarship in her post, “Making Digital Collaboration Visible.”
Chinese Hackers vs United States’ Higher Education
While not as attention grabbing as Apple, Facebook, and the New York Times being hacked, two higher education institutions were also hacked according to Mandiant.
MOOC Moment of Zen
Daniel Luzer raises the question of how MOOCs might be a weapon in the war against higher education. Forbes‘ James Crotty examines the role of badges as a representation of completion for MOOCs. While the Financial Times reports on Coursera’s expansion and offering of classes in Chinese, Spanish, French, and Italian. Cutting through the buzz surrounding MOOCs, Duke released a report, Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach, that assesses their first MOOC. Finally, for those interested in learning GIS, Penn State will be teaching a GIS or GEO-MOOC later this year.
