Some institutions are opening newly built or renovated information commons for the first time, and others are already renovating existing information commons spaces. This session will provide a virtual tour of and commentary on some of the current trends in information commons by exploring technology issues, services, furniture, unique features, and assessment. Join a discussion of trends and add examples from your institution.

Handout (MS Word)

PowerPoint Presentation

Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) is a two-year effort funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to define and specify an interoperability fabric that promotes reuse and exchange of compound digital objects. The target application area of this fabric is scholarly communication, in which the products are increasingly data-oriented, multi-format compound resources, and where the open access movement has led to increased online availability of these products. The work of OAI-ORE is mainly undertaken by an international technical committee (TC) and a project-focused liaison group (LG). The TC met for two days in January 2007 and is scheduled to meet again in May 2007 in combination with members of the LG. This briefing will provide up-to-date information on the status of OAI-ORE work and provide opportunities for the broader community to react. It will also outline planned experimental frameworks that the OAI-ORE will lead starting in third quarter 2007.

In May 2006 the University of Washington (UW) Libraries Digital Initiatives unit began a project to integrate the UW Libraries Digital Collections into the information workflow of our students by inserting links into the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The explosive growth of Wikipedia made it a prime candidate for our efforts at pushing information about the Libraries out to where students conduct research. This briefing will describe the phenomenon known as Wikipedia; we will also describe the process of adding links to Wikipedia articles as well as the outcomes of the project.

Handout (MS Word)

During the fall of 2006, Ithaka (along with its affiliates JSTOR and Portico) commissioned a large survey of faculty at colleges and universities in the United States to learn about their habits and preferences related to electronic research and teaching resources. Faculty members are moving to the new electronic environment at different rates, with discipline being among the most significant factors explaining their differences. More than 4,100 faculty from numerous academic disciplines responded.

Some of the topics that will be discussed in this project briefing include: faculty’s views of the library and how its role is changing; their increasing use of and satisfaction with electronic research resources (including e-books); their attitudes towards the transition away from print format for scholarly journals; and their levels of concern with archiving of both print and electronic resources. Comparisons will be made with baseline findings from 2000 and 2003 whenever possible (the findings of which were presented at CNI sSring Task Force meetings in 2001 and 2002), along with our 2006 librarian study (the findings of which were presented at the CNI Fall Task Force meeting in 2006).

http://www.ithaka.org/research

PowerPoint Presentation

The New Media Consortium’s Horizon Report aims to meet the needs outlined by visionary Doug Englebart for “improving the improvement infrastructure.” In its fourth year of publication, the Horizon Report identifies and describes six technologies likely to impact teaching, learning, and creative expression at higher education organizations, putting them on three adoption time frames of one to five years. A project in conjunction with EDUCAUSE/ELI, this year’s report cited user created content, social networking, mobile phones, virtual worlds, new scholarship / emerging forms of publication, and massively multiplayer educational gaming. These may not be very new to those involved with educational technology, but the Horizon Report’s focus is on when they will become widely adopted, not just technically viable. The research done behind the report is driven by an Advisory Board of 27 leaders in education and industry from around the world, and is carried out without a single meeting or teleconference – all the work is done in the Horizon Project’s open wiki. This session, featuring three members of the project’s advisory board, will provide insight into the process, analyze the six final technologies (and reference some of the other 200+ ones initially surfaced), discuss the dangers of guessing the “unevenly distributed future,” and share how the report has impacted institutions. We will also share some of the reaction to the report reflected in the blogosphere.

http://www.nmc.org/horizon

Handout (PDF)

http://www.slideshare.net/nmc/whats-in-your-horizon