Michael Lynch

Posts by Michael Lynch

 
 
 

Massive Open Online Courses as Drivers for Change

Categories: LIS Staff Interest

A project briefing session presented at CNI’s fall 2012 membership meeting by Lynne O’Brien of Duke University. Now available on CNI’s two video channels:

Since announcing a partnership with Coursera in July 2012, Duke has launched two Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and has eight more in development. Spanning humanities, social sciences and science topics, these courses have over 320,000 enrollments as of October 2012. Duke’s goals in experimenting with MOOCs are to drive teaching innovation in both campus-based and online courses, to extend Duke’s commitment to knowledge in service to society, and to expand Duke’s reach and reputation in a global environment.

Friday Links, December 7, 2012

Categories: LIS Staff Interest

Higher education: Not what it used to be (via The Economist)

Saved from Dumpster: Amazing map collection makes librarians tingle (from the LA Times)

Stressing about finals?

Categories: Middlebury Community Interest

Refresh Your Mind with Guided and Drop-In Meditation, December 10-15 – Mitchell Green Lounge in McCullough will be open and set up for meditation from 6 AM to 11 PM during finals week.  Simple printed meditation instructions are available, so drop in anytime.

Guided meditations will also be offered at 9:00 AM, 12:30 PM, 4:30 PM, and 8:00 PM each day. These will be twenty minutes long and will be facilitated by faculty members Rebecca Gould, John Huddleston, Chris Shaw, John Spackman, and Catharine Wright, as well as experienced student facilitators Adeline Cleveland and Blake Harper, and Parton Counseling staff.   Meditation teaches relaxation and concentration: so come, take a break, and refresh your mind! Sponsored by Parton Counseling.

Friday Links – August 17, 2012

Categories: LIS Staff Interest, Middlebury Community Interest

Five ways that social media can benefit IT – This article focuses on IT as a consumer of social media services, not as a driver in the organization

Considerations for libraries looking at SaaS (Software as a Service).

We’re NASA and we know it.  From Wired, “This music video is the reason nerds rule. Forever.”

Also from Wired: Google’s Dremel makes big data look small.

Friday links – July 6, 2012

Categories: LIS Staff Interest

Want to have better meetings? Ditch PowerPoint – For some, a PowerPoint presentation causes them to automatically tune out. Here’s what to do in your meetings instead.

The Classic, Beautiful and Controversial Books That Changed Science Forever - Without the work of intellectual giants like Einstein, Newton and Darwin, we might still be in the dark ages. But how many scientists still read the dust-ridden texts where these luminaries first expounded their theories? Here’s the story of 10 famous publications that spun the scientific world off its orbit.

This just in: Mermaids are NOT real, U.S. agency says

Friday links – June 22, 2012

Categories: LIS Staff Interest

Free topo maps from USGS – US Topo is the new generation of digital topographic maps from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Arranged in the traditional 7.5-minute quadrangle format, digital US Topo maps look and feel like the traditional paper topographic maps for which the USGS is so well known.

US Topo maps are available free on the Web through the USGS Store. Each map quadrangle is constructed in PDF format with geospatial extensions (GeoPDF®) format from key layers of geographic data – orthoimagery, roads, geographic names, contours and hydrographic features – found in The National Map.

 

Friday links – March 2, 2012

Categories: LIS Staff Interest, Middlebury Community Interest

National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) and the Council for Library and Information Resources (CLIR) have created Anvil Academic, a digital publisher for the humanities. Anvil aims to make it easier for digital humanists to publish nontraditional scholarly work under the auspices of traditional outlets, such as university presses.

“Patron-driven Acquisitions” – also known as The Bookstore in the Library. ” The fact that the PDA bookstore is anchored in the [college] community is essential to its conception and operation. It is the nature of the community that … determines what books can be purchased through the library.” (This piece goes a few steps beyond that.)

New speech-jamming gun – At its most basic, this gun could be used in libraries and other quiet spaces to stop people from speaking.

Tax-unfriendly states for retirees, 2011  – Vermont is #1, according to Kiplinger.

Friday links — February 24

Categories: LIS Staff Interest

UCSC library sees student visits double after $100 million renovation. With laptop bars, couches for gathering, long study tables and an outdoor reading porch perched high among the redwoods, student use of the 47-year-old campus landmark has more than doubled since before the renovation.  The revamped original building will house the Grateful Dead Archives in a room known as Dead Central.

Eternal Copyright: a modest proposal. Under the current system, if you lived to 70 years old and your descendants all had children at the age of 30, the copyright in your book – and thus the proceeds – would provide for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. But what, I ask, about your great-great-great-grandchildren?

Libraries help researchers save time, says new report - Dr Hazel Woodward, chair of the electronic information resources working group and librarian at Cranfield University: “At this time of economic constraint, it is important for policy makers and Library directors to provide additional evidence of the value of library-provided resources. Whilst in the past these resources have been regarded as implicitly valuable, this research goes some way to making that value more explicit by focusing on specific benefits and outcomes for academics.”

Smaller Servings for Libraries - Decades of Education Department data show universities allocating less money to libraries as overall spending has ballooned.

Striking Finds From a Rare-Book Fair From Audubon’s The Birds of America, a first edition of which sold last month at auction for $7.9 million, to Copernicus’ heliocentric sketch that changed the world, we’ve selected the most remarkable works the fair had to offer.

Is there a method to Google’s madness? An outside observer might conclude that Google has little direction and a surfeit of cash as it lurches from search, to mapping, to mobile, to home audio players, to cloud file sharing.