CT Briefs
:: NEWS
LEARN BEFORE YOU BURN.
This fall, the University of California-Berkeley mounted a “Learn Before
You Burn” campaign to warn its freshman
class against downloading copyrighted
music. In their first week on
campus, the students went through an
orientation on the penalties of illegal
downloading. Anyone caught illegally
downloading copyrighted files will be
removed from the university network
for a full week. Read more here.
DREXEL U’s iSchool helps maintain the Internet
Public Library as a public resource and digital training
ground in information science.
INTERNET LIBRARY GETS A
NEW LIFE. With more than $600K
in funding from the US Institute of
Museum and Library Services’ Laura
Bush 21st Century Librarian Program
grant, the iSchool at
Drexel University (PA) is collaborating
with the University of Michigan,
the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, and Florida State
University to transform Drexel’s Internet
Public Library (originally launched
in 1995) into a learning
laboratory for information science
students and faculty, and to develop
and maintain the site with updated
services that can help provide extensive
hands-on digital librarianship
experience for information science
students. Eileen Abels, a professor
in Drexel’s College of Information
Science and Technology, points to IPL
as a “valuable public resource and
teaching tool,” with more than 12 million
hits per month.
ALUMNI ARE CLICKING.
Columbia Southern University (AL)
has launched a new “CSU Click” online
service for its alumni. The service provides
social networking functionality
for the school’s grads so they may
blog, share photos, and network about
their careers and current interests with
more than 9,000 CSU alums.
TUNED IN TO HISTORY.
The State University of New York-
Maritime College is offering two new
online courses this fall that were
developed in collaboration with The
History Channel.
Both courses are based around History
Channel television series content and
will be offered for credit, marking the
first time the TV channel has developed
content for college credit.
BLUE WATERS RUN FAST.
$208 million from the National Science
Foundation will help the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
build the “Blue Waters” computer,
which is expected to go live in 2011
at petaflop speeds—a new class of computation
capable of more than 1,000
trillion operations per second. The system
will be operated by the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications and its academic
and industry partners in the Great
Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation.
Read more here.
GETTING THE MESSAGE OUT.
Wayne State University (MI) has
launched a broadcast service that can
send emergency alerts or other informational
messages directly to student
and faculty cell phones, e-mail
addresses, or IM accounts, based on the
individual’s choice of message services.
The cell phone method is proving to be
the most popular for emergency notification, comprising nearly 75 percent of
the signups for emergency messages,
say WSU administrators. Deputy CIO
and Director of IT Support Services
Patrick Gossman adds that the system
does not require Wayne State’s 33,000
students to switch cell phone providers
in order to take advantage of the service,
as it works with 69 service
providers currently operating in the
Montclair area.
:: PEOPLE
A CLIR CHOICE FOR
RESEARCH.
Michael Keller is
the new Senior Presidential Fellow
at the Council on Library and Information
Resources. The
appointment with
CLIR will support
research that examines
the recommendations
of recent
cyber-infrastructure reports and
explores the roles and functions of
institutional repositories, digital
archives, and digital libraries. Keller
will continue to work from Stanford
University (CA), where he is university
librarian and director of academic
information resources. Read
more here.
