Still love my Droid and still very busy at work. I worked with six classes this week. My favorite class was International Trade. They had to find a wide range of statistics.

The RUSA/MARS Local Systems & Services Committee invites you to join our discussion forum 'Discovery Systems: Solutions a User Could Love?' at Midwinter.

When: Sunday, January 17, 2010 from 1:30-3:00 pm
Where: Westin Waterfront, Faneiul Room (Mezzanine Level)
425 Summer Street connected to the Boston Convention and Exhibit Center

Panelists include:

• Marshall Breeding, Director for Innovative Technology and Research, Vanderbilt University who will provide a brief "Overview of Discovery Systems."
• Cody Hanson, Technology Librarian, University of Minnesota, who will briefly discuss "User testing and feedback on Primo at the University of Minnesota."
  
• Frances McNamara, Director, Integrated Library Systems and Administrative and Desktop Systems, University of Chicago, who will briefly share experiences of the "LENS Discovery System, based on AquaBrowser." and; 
  
• Barbara DeFelice, Director Digital Resources Program, Dartmouth College who will discuss "Summon @ Dartmouth College: the User View."
  

Our panelists will highlight the experiences of libraries that have implemented "next generation discovery tools" that provide access to disparate library collections from a single search box. Panelists will focus their comments on user response and subsequent assessment of the local implementation. 

Discussion forum participants will be able to share their experiences with discovery tools and ask questions following the panelists. A summary of the key ideas gleaned will be posted on the MARS Local Systems & Services web page following Midwinter.

Photo credit: The photo "Magnified" was taken by Jake Bouma (jakebouma) on March 9, 2009 and uploaded to Flickr on March 10, 2009 with an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License. The photo was downloaded on January 3, 2010 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakebouma/3345296623/ 

Monday

• Updated information about new MLA and APA styles on web site
• Installed new barcode wand on first circulation computer and replaced the broken cord on the barcode wand on the second circulation computer
• Met with Physical Plant Director about roof leak
• Began to write staff performance appraisals
• Notified everyone working in the building of the problem with the A/C chiller and Physical Plant's timeframe for the fix
• Wrote narrative describing library resources supporting the athletic training curriculum as part of a self-study team for program re-accreditation

Tuesday

• Updated content on athletic training subject guide on web site
• Posted draft minutes of RUSA Reference Services Section's Web Advisory Committee to ALA Connect and emailed to appropriate RSS folks
• Sent email welcoming new member who has agreed to join RUSA MARS Local Systems & Services
• Posted draft minutes of Local Systems & Services Committee to ALA Connect and emailed to new member not yet in the system
• Created a planning document in ALA Connect for our discussion forum on the local customization and evaluation of discovery services to be held at Midwinter in Boston
• Ran a wide variety of reports on circulation statistics of unbound and bound journals
• Met with Director of Academic Resource Center to learn about the positive changes being made to the football study tables that are held in the library during fall semester
• Re-iterated my philosophy that "fear of theft" is not a criterion for collection development

Wednesday

• Signed authorizations for bill payment and entered amounts into my budget tracking spreadsheet.
• Continued to write performance appraisals
• Met with faculty member coordinating the last class in our Arts & Humanities sequence to refine library instruction objectives from last semester
• Reviewed the final details of the DVD relocation and reclassification (from Dewey to LC) project
• Reviewed existing processing workflow of serials and the long standing circulation policy of serials (Circ stats are low, time investment in front/backend processing is high, rationale for circulating is no longer valid in my opinion..again fear of theft and cutting.)
• Met with Computer Services staff to learn what network services will still be available to the second year (were DC now are Northwest State) students in our 1+2+1 nursing program with Northwest State Community College 

Thursday

• Met with circulation supervisor and A/V coordinator to plan for student worker needs for coming academic year and talk about potential for cross-training students to work circulation and A/V tech support
• Reviewed existing loan rules, loan rule limiter table, and what authorizations our students have in Millennium with circulation supervisor in order to submit a request to OPAL Help to enact the policy change to no longer circulate serials
• Met with faculty member coordinating Master of Arts in Education graduate program to finalize process for loading theses into the OhioLINK Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Center
• Created authorization form and letter to be sent to targeted past graduates to obtain permission to digitize their theses to load into the ETD Center
• Emailed and then talked on the phone with the Assistant Dean for Adult and Graduate Programs to initiate process with OhioLINK for Defiance College to join the ETD Center

Friday

• Reviewed our current statistics of missing items and discussed the "search for missing item process" with circulation supervisor
• Walked the stacks for 15 minutes and found six of the missing books (go me!)
• Learned via email that I chose wisely during database funding reconstruction. The Library will be paying a larger percentage than in the past, but our students and faculty will still have access to specific discipline databases. 
• Exchanged emails with OhioLINK about our request to join the ETD Center
• Met with circulation supervisor about student worker evaluation process
• Continued to write staff performance appraisals
• Submitted request to OPAL Help to make necessary changes to specific loan rules to enact our policy change of making serials non-circulating

Here are my plans for Chicago. As always, there are multiple things I would love to do every spare minute of Annual. In reality, my brain gets fried and I tend to skip a session in the afternoon…so this is my optimistic schedule.

Let me know if you are going to be attending any of these events or feel free to say hello if you see me around.

Friday, July 10, 2009
3:30-4:30 PM – MARS Executive Committee I (New Chairs Orientation)

5:30-7:30 PM – MARS Happy Hour at Big Bar/Hyatt Regency

Saturday, July 11, 2009
8:00-10:30 AM – RSS Open House and Web Advisory Committee

10:30-Noon – FYE: Connecting First-Year College Students with the Library. Not holding my breath that I can make it to McCormick…so I may end up at Information Commons Discussion Group.

1:30-3:00 PM – Discussion Group: Open Source
I have no clue what this is going to be about, but it is being sponsored by RUSA Reference Services Section.

3:30-5:00 PM – Instruction Section Current Topics Discussion I: Teacher Proficiencies: Applying Proficiency Standards for Instruction Librarians in Your Library

Sunday, July 12, 2009
8:00-10:00 AM – MARS All Committee Meeting/Local Systems & Services Committee. I agreed to serve as chair for this year.

10:30-Noon – Instruction Section Current Topics Discussion II: Using Discovery-Based Learning to Engage Students with Information Literacy

Lunch with a friend

1:30-3:00 PM – College Library Directors Discussion Group

3:30-5:30 PM – You Got Me, Do You Like Me? Evaluating Next Generation Catalogs OR Illuminating New Instruction Research: Applying Research to Practice

4:00-5:30 PM 5th Annual Book cart Drill Team Championship

Monday, July 13, 2009
8:00-Noon – MARS Executive Committee II. Report out as Local Systems & Services Chair. I don’t think I’ll have to be there the entire time.

Lunch with a former OPAL colleague

1:30-3:00 PM – RUSA President’s Program: From the Book and Beyond: Interdisciplinary Readers’ Advisory

5:00-6:30 PM – PLA President’s Program and Awards Presentation featuring Cokie Roberts. I’m going for Cokie Roberts and not so much for the PLA Awards.

I’m not heading back to Ohio until Tuesday morning.

I’ve read a couple of posts over the last few days from other librarians feeling guilty about not tending to their blog as they would like. I didn’t intentionally plan on taking a year off. Like most of you, a lot of my communication has dispersed into various social media streams. You know the obvious culprits…Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, and del.icio.us. I did consider abandoning this blog, until I noticed that my site visit stats show that people are still tripping across content. The stats indicate that people are mostly “reading” the posts written about conference sessions. I guess I will keep the blog up for awhile and see if I can get into another posting groove (if only to buck the dead and dying blog trend that not many people are blogging about but lamenting on those other social channels).

In case you are curious, here is what I did during my year long blogcation…

• Interviewed for a job and was not the successful candidate in June 2008. Oh to have national exposure. Knowing what I know now…it worked out for the best that I didn’t get the position.
• Attended ALA Annual 2008 in Anaheim (pictures). My first trip to SoCal and also to Disneyland. I realize that Anaheim isn’t representative of all of southern California, but I think I still prefer San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area.
• Right-sized the reference collection at MFPOW in July and August (pictures).
• Received the Ohio Private Academic Library service award at the 10th OPAL Conference held at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus at the beginning of August.
• Interviewed for a library director position in mid-August (yeah about two weeks before classes started). Was offered and accepted an excellent opportunity at Defiance College in northwest Ohio (35 miles from where I grew up).
• Worked very hard to wrap-up projects and transition knowledge to colleagues and get the house sold in Zanesville during August and September.
• Left my former position as Head of User Services at Muskingum College on September 30 and started as Director of Library and Informational Resources on October 1. I don’t recommend the “no downtime” plan when switching jobs. My preference would have been not to do it that way, but that’s how it worked out. I think I was able to pull it off, because I had family in the area (no need to find an apartment for a few weeks) and because both libraries are members of OPAL (Ohio Private Academic Libraries…not the Online Programming yada yada group) and OhioLINK.
• Accepted into the CLS College Library Directors Mentor Program and assigned a terrific mentor.
• Wrote a successful application for a team from Defiance College to attend the CIC/NITLE/Project Kaleidoscope 2009 Learning Spaces and Technology Workshop for our learning commons renovation project.
• Closed on the sale of the Zanesville house on Halloween. We didn’t make as much off of the sale as we had hoped, but still not complaining because we actually walked away with a check when most houses were not selling.
• Looked at 12 houses in Defiance on November 1. Made an offer two days later on an empty 1960s two story that needed mostly cosmetic work and moved in on November 13. Moving company delivered our worldly possessions the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
• Reworked the entire Pilgrim Library web site over Christmas break.
• Attended the College Library Directors Mentor Program preceding Midwinter in Denver. Learned a lot about myself and what it takes to lead a smaller library. Perfected my elevator speech on how Defiance, Ohio was named.
• Had a successful RSS Web Advisory committee meeting at Midwinter. My other committee meeting was not that successful. I was the only one that showed up for the MARS Local Systems & Services meeting. No one else on the committee came to Midwinter. I ended up going over and hanging out at the Publications committee table. Overall, Midwinter went well. Had a great conversation with Chris C. about the direction of the RUSA web site and how to align RSS content with the big picture.
• February was cold and snowy and reminded me I had been gone from northwest Ohio winters for 20 years.
• Took a convoluted set of flights to get from Detroit to Richmond, VA (return flights were yet a different route) in order to save money to attend the Learning Spaces & Technology workshop the first week of March. Brought back a lot of good ideas and validation that our initial planning for a learning commons was on the right track. My takeaways: wheels give permission to move and developing successful collaborative learning spaces is an iterative process that builds on incremental change. (pictures)
• April was an intensive print reference rightsizing project to liberate floor space for a relocated computer lab and presenting on our learning commons sandbox project to faculty, staff, and new members of the board.
• May brought news of the exact dollar amount I had to work with for our learning commons sandbox area…not leaving a lot of time to source and procure furniture.
• Attend IUG 2009 back in sunny Anaheim in mid-May (felt like deja-vu since I had just been in Anaheim 11 months earlier). Conference and travel was paid for by OPAL since I had won the service award in 2008. It was my first IUG and probably my last IUG. I think it’s a good conference for systems librarians, catalogers, front-line circulation/access services folk, acquisitions folk, and public service librarians if you have your own III installation. I didn’t see a lot of value for reference librarians if you are on a shared catalog. (pictures…but none of the actual conference)
• June was jam-packed with book shifting, removal of shelving, and taking a chainsaw to the separate reference and circulation desks to come up with a new solution. Take a look at my learning commons set on Flickr to get a feel for the transformation to date.

That about wraps up the overview of this last year. I really do plan on getting back into writing mode. There is a lot more I would like to write about the Learning Spaces & Technology workshop and my experiences from our learning commons project.

I hope you stick around or at least stumble upon a future post via your favorite search engine.

Thursday, June 26

• Arrive at John Wayne Airport at Noon
• Dinner with LA friend

Friday, June 27

• OCLC Symposium: The Mashed-up Library, 1:30 to 4:30 p.m.
• Meet the MARtians Happy Hour (maybe), 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, June 28 

• Reference Services Section (RSS) Open House, 8 to 9 a.m.
• RSS Web Advisory Committee Meeting, 9 to 10:30 a.m. 
• Research to Understand Users: Issues and Approaches, 10:30 to Noon
• There's No Catalog Like No Catalog: The Ultimate Debate on the future of the Library Catalog, 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
• ACRL-IS Current Topics Discussion I: Using the Social Web to Promote and Enhance Information Literacy, 4 to 5:30 p.m.

Sunday, June 29

• Beyond Gaming Tournaments, 8 to 10 a.m.
• What is the Future of Face-to-Face Reference? Is Face-to-Face Reference Dying?, 10:30 to Noon
• 14th Annual New Reference Research Forum, 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
• RSS Executive Committee II, 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
• Book Cart Drill Team Championship, 4 to 5:30 p.m.
• Dinner with former coworker

Monday, June 30

• Reference Services to Teens, 8 to 10 a.m.
• Booklist/Reference Books Bulletin: The Future of Electronic Reference Publishing, a View from the Top, 10:30 to Noon
• RUSA President's Program: Quality Service in an Impersonal World, 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
• PLA President's Program: Jamie Lee Curtis 5 to 6:30 p.m.

Tuesday, July 1

• Auditorium Speaker Series featuring Khaled Hossein, 8 to 9 a.m.
• Disneyland/Disney's California Adventure

Wednesday, July 2 

• Disneyland/Disney's California Adventure

Thursday, July 3

• Fly out 9:45 a.m. and arrive in Columbus 7 p.m. 

The issue with this specific session was the use of the phrase "lessons learned" in the title and the thought provoking questions posed in description. Instead of hearing about lessons learned or best practices or tips or sage advice…I heard an infomercial.  My disappointment stems from the content presented not being scalable or applicable to another institution. Don't tempt us with "How do you prioritize your resources and staff?" to only tell us that you were able to hire more librarians and have money for an information commons. That's great for you, however it's not practical or implementable for the majority of your audience.

The only transferable "lesson learned" (and not even to my local situation) I got out of the presentation is to share laptops between library departments. Do you use laptops for instruction and for lending to students? Great! Work with circulation/access services/whomever controls the lending side to pool laptops during peak times of the academic year. Use the majority of laptops for instruction at the beginning of the semester/quarter (when instruction is high and assignments low). Reverse the distribution model at the end of the semester. Let circulation/access services use your laptops for students to borrow to work on all of those end of term papers and projects. You're probably not doing much (if any) instruction at the end of the term. It's a win-win and a great way to extend those insufficient capital expense dollars.

Feel free to take a look at the PowerPoint slides.  You might get something out of them that is useful for your institution. My lesson learned for you? Go with your gut instinct when picking conference sessions. I'll try to do a better job with all of my schedule conflicts in Anaheim.

If I could do it over again, I would have gone to hear Paul Waelchli and Sara Holladay talk about "Fantasy Sports: The Road to Information Literacy Championships." Paul and Sara win the prize for information sharing! You have to appreciate the amount of time they put into creating an amazing Fantasy Football Toolkit for Libraries. Check it out…

• PowerPoint presentation slides
• Fantasy Football 101 Handout
• Fantasy Football Lesson Plan
• Bridge document linking Fantasy Football activities to ACRL Information Literacy Standards

Kim and Scott started with the argument that our students are not savvy enough to know when they have left our discovery tools to access paid content. Students have not made the connection yet, even though they probably have a similar mental model. Students normally don't consider how much money is spent to provide access to electronic journal articles. They go to the library web site and get access to the content for free (with few or little authentication barriers), so it's just like a lot of other content on the open web.

Strategies they have been using successfully with upper level classes…

Start with what students already know about the peer review process and build on their prior knowledge.  Challenge assumptions by asking:

• Why don't researchers just use blogs?
• Do all papers submitted get published?
• Are all journals equal?
• Do authors get royalties?
• How much does it cost an author to publish?

Examples of sticker shock were used to further challenge assumptions about how much scholarly content actually costs. This naturally leads to a discussion about why publishers charge so much and why libraries provide access to expensive content. They discuss the various stakeholders in the publishing process: author, publisher, database vendor, and library.

Continued discussion of the invisible web follows, where the concept that Google doesn't make a distinction when indexing content if it is free or free. The crawlers are just discovering content and making a pointer to it available for retrieval. Finally, Scott and Kim were able to leverage the existing mental model of online shopping (buying airline tickets at Expedia or Travelocity) to help the student make the connection between discovery and access.

All librarians had been using a standard student evaluation form that had a four point Likert scale and a single comment box at the end. They found the disconnect between the scores and the comments to be problematic and not useful in making changes. It was decided to modify the evaluation form to ask for qualitative feedback for each question.

The modified evaluation form asks the following three questions

1. I learned something useful for this workshop.

• Strongly Agree: Name one thing you learned from this workshop?
• Agree: Name one thing you learned from this workshop?
• Disagree: How can the workshop be improved?
• Strongly Disagree: How can the workshop be improved? 

2. I think this librarian was a good teacher.

• Strongly Agree: What did you like about the teaching?
• Agree: What did you like about the teaching?
• Disagree: What did you dislike about the teaching?
• Strongly Disagree: What did you dislike about the teaching? 

3. I would recommend this workshop to someone interested in library research.

• Strongly Agree
• Agree
• Disagree
• Strongly Disagree 

They chose a comment based metric methodology for assessment. This is similar to what the University of Virginia Library is doing with their balanced scorecard metrics.  "What did you dislike about the teaching?" was chosen as the question to measure. This would allow for the librarian teaching to have something tangible for improving instructional delivery. A target of less than 5% negative comments was set to be the measure for total success. Partial success would be achieved if 5 to 10% of the comments were negative. 

Advantages

• Evidence based
• Allows for goals to be set and measured
• Flexible to measure what you want to know

Disadvantages

• Time intensive, especially coding qualitative comments
• Difficult to change evaluation forms if you want to go back and measure another goal 

Questions to consider

• What do you want to know?
• How are you going to measure? 
• Are you going to focus on evaluation scores (quantitative) or comments (qualitative)?
• What is the target for success?
• Who is going to compile the results?

Their PowerPoint slides are available.

They used the backward design model from Making the most of understanding by deign and Debra Gilchrist's five questions (see their PowerPoint slides) to envision the revised program. Their new program included a pre-activity, library visit, and post-activity. They deemed the redesign a success, but decided to modify it based on student feedback. 

Detailed information can be found in their PowerPoint slides.

Anne described the initial discussion by the Library staff and the pros/cons of the course having a library (LIB) designation in the course catalog. Anne listed some of the challenges the Library faced getting the course approved by the University's Curriculum Committee. She suggested talking to members of the committee before bringing the course proposal to identify questions early enough to get answers. 

Some ideas given during the presentation that I will probably integrated into the two credit hour course I teach:

• Structure assignment grades so that students with an A don't have to take a final (or do the final project in my class). 
• Assign students to take notes and post them on a wiki or blog. Have students review the notes at the start of the next class and make changes.
• Promote the course on the Library's web site.

Anne posted their PowerPoint slides (4.6 MB) and recommended reviewing her LIB 103 class blog for syllabus and assignment examples. Rachel also has her LIB103 syllabus and assignment online if you are interested.

I was glad I attended this session even though I've been teaching a two credit hour course for the past three years. My biggest challenge (frustration?) teaching the course is getting students to turn in assignments. It was reassuring to hear that others have experience many of the same challenges.

Feel free to take a look at what I used for our Library Research Methods course for this past Fall semester. You may also want to look at the modified syllabus for Spring.  

• Idea support – are new ideas encouraged or judged?
• Trust and openness – are staff free to share ideas?
• Discussion – are staff comfortable enough to discuss the idea freely?
• Challenge and involvement – do staff feel that they own the organization and have a stake in success?
• Idea time – do staff have time to work on new ideas as part of normal job?
• Humor and play – are staff comfortable enough to be humorous at work?
• Freedom – are staff macro or micro managed?
• Risk taking – do staff feel they can fail and not be punished?
• Degree of conflict – are staff in competition with one another or other groups within organization?

 Laurel suggested a few tactics to focus creativity:

• Work backwards from the end solution.
• Ask the question, "Wouldn't it be nice if…" to help define outcomes.
• Ask the question, "In what ways might we…" to help define options.
• Challenge an assumption by writing down its opposite, identify advantages that could come from the challenges of the opposite assumption, study the challenged assumptions and identify new opportunities.

She recommended the book, Ideas are free: how the idea revolution is liberating people and transforming organizations for further reading.

Make sure to attend the 14th Annual New Reference Research Forum on Sunday, June 29 from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. at Hilton Anaheim, Conference Room 8. The three peer-reviewed research projects that will be presented include: 

• The READ Scale (Reference Effort Assessment Data) Project: Qualitative Statistics for Meaningful Reference Assessment, A Report of the National Study – Bella Karr Gerlich & G. Lynn Berard
• Does Size Matter? Examining Trends in the Provision of Remote Reference Services in Academic and Public Libraries – Denise Agosto, Eileen Abels & Lorri Mon
• Problems, Processes and Judgments: User Expectations of Online Reference Service – Lynn Westbrook

Read more about the other Reference Services Section programs and discussion groups taking place at Annual on the RSS Events page. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. I'll do my best to answer them or direct you to the correct person.

Disclosure statement: Yes, this is a shameless plug for the Reference Services Section. I do it because I am a member of the RSS Web Advisory Committee and RSS Co-Web Manager. Spreading the word about our activities is an easy thing for me to do with this blog.

The thing I am still trying to figure out is why some librarian bloggers using Twitter protect their tweets. They have no problems writing blog posts, so what is the hesitation with sharing microblog posts?  I agree that it is more than wise to be professional in all public venues. In fact, David Lee King posted today about a SXSWi presentation on "social networking and your brand". One of the points made during the presentation is that tweets can be taken out of context very easily. However, I cannot really imagine the librarians protecting their updates are swearing up a storm or planning to overthrow the good folks at 50 E. Huron Street.

Cindi Trainor's post last week, "The Tweet heard round the world," is what caused me to start looking at how other librarians are using Twitter. I was a bit surprised to see who has chosen to protect their updates. I'm still curious to know why people made this choice. Please leave a comment if you have any thoughts on why or if you have enabled protection of your Twitter updates and feel comfortable sharing.

Feel free to start following me. I don't have any plans to protect my feed, but I also don't plan on sharing family secrets.

Found via Stephen's Lighthouse. 

Scott Scheidlower from York College (CUNY) lead the discussion. Scott started by reminding us that the student, the institution's disability coordinator, and the instructor/librarian are all responsible for student success.  We must accommodate special requests if possible, except if they are prohibitively expensive. The student's disability must be documented with the institution for the accommodation to be required.

Invisible disabilities are not seen by casual observation. Invisible disabilities can include deafness, dyslexia, color blindness, depression, and mental illness. It is okay for us to ask how to help someone. It is not okay to ask what the disability is specifically.

Scott is a firm believer that we should understand and effectively use Gardner's multiple intelligences to increase student learning. Scott had created 10 scenarios and assigned each table to discuss two. I jotted down notes as each table reported their ideas.

These ideas can be used to improve your teaching technique and handouts for students with/without disabilities:

• speak clearly and depending on the room louder than normal
• face your students when speaking (speechreading aka lip reading)
• make sure you are illuminated in a dark room
• gesture with your hand or with a laser pointer instead of saying "click the search button"
• number handouts instead of relying on color to distinguish the
• use shading or patters on charts and graphs instead of colors
• label colors with numbers
• consistently use the same shape to represent a color (e.g. triangles are red, squares are blue)
• ask a student to take notes and make them available to the entire class
• ask a student to navigate the computer allowing you the ability to maintain eye contact and gesture freely
• accept alternative assignments if possible
• determine if your disability services office provides a scribe service

These ideas can be used to improve the computers in your libraries and your library's web sites:

• install a text to speech screen reader on computers
• install voice recognition software on at least one machine
• use alt text in html pages to be very descriptive of the image being displayed
• don't use frames and limit the use of tables to layout pages

One participant suggested that we find out if our institution was a member of Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. She had positive experiences working with "RFB&D" to obtain materials for students.

Scott recommended that we read the following references for more information.

Fabio, D. (1994-2007). Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences. In Encyclopedia of educational technology. Retrieved December 3, 2007, from <http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/Articles/multiintell/index.htm>

Hernon, P., & Calvert, P. (Eds.). (2006). Improving the quality of library services for students with disabilities. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

Hurst, A. (1996). Reflecting on researching disability and higher education. In L. Barton (Ed.), Disability and society: Emerging issues and insights (pp. 123-46). Longman sociology series. London: Longman.

Konur, O. (2006, July). Teaching disabled students in Higher Education. Teaching in Higher Education, 11(3), 351-363. Retrieved January 3, 2007. doi:10.1080/13562510600680871

U.S. Department of Justice. (n.d.). ADA home page. Retrieved November 27, 2007, from <http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/ada/adahom1.htm>

[tags]ALAMW08, Midwinter08[/tags] 

"Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all."

"The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an unprecedented amount of data to explore."

I still have to wonder how this will be monetized. Or, will this project be underwritten by Google's main revenue stream? Guess those institutional repositories will still have some room in them after all.

Read the full story with links to more details at "Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data" on Wired Science.