October is Disability Employment Awareness Month. Come to the Davis Family Library atrium October 2nd- 15th to see our display that includes books and DVDs that touch on a variety of themes related to disability. Also read below about the various efforts made to make our campus more accessible and inclusive. Many sincere thanks to Marlena Evans for her work in designing this month’s banner and to the Advisory Group on Disability, Access, and Inclusion for its generous guidance. Continue reading
Our first priority with the Segue from Segue project is to make sure there are technology solutions available to meet the needs of as many faculty, students and staff as possible. That said, we would like to also be able to support innovative uses of technology, particularly those innovations that may eventually be useful to the broader community.
To this end, the Curricular Technology team invited a number of faculty who are innovators to show us how they have been using technology and tell us what they need. Faculty who participated included Jeff Byers (Chemistry and Biochemistry), Hector Vila (CTLR), Enrique Garcia (Spanish), Hope Tucker (Film and Media Culture) and Roberto Veguez (Spanish). A number of academic liaisons also participated in this session. To learn more about what these faculty have been doing, see:
We have online access to a large number of journals and newspapers. The terms governing our access vary considerably, and can change with the passage of time. One of the most important aspects of our access is the extent to which it is dependable and permanent. Following is an attempt to illustrate the range of stability of our electronic offerings.
The most stable and permanent situation is when we have a subscription with the publisher to a specific journal or packaged group of journals (e.g. Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Taylor & Francis). In this case we have guaranteed permanent access to all material published during the years of our subscription. Often we will also have access to a backfile of material published before our subscription started. In some cases we are assured continuing access to this backfile, while in other cases ongoing access to any material dating from before the start of our subscription is not guaranteed. Continue reading
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deeplinks blog has an informative and balanced series of posts concerning the revised Google Books settlement that was announced last month. This settlement has the potential to provide public access to more books than most major research libraries own, but of course there are down sides as well, such as the potential for Google to impose monopoly pricing over subscriptions to institutions such as the Middlebury Library.
Anyway, the EFF posts are informative and well-written. Take a look.
Part 1, Evaluating the Pros and Cons