
Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Wiki2Tei

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

posted to the TEI list

Wiki2Tei converter 1.0

We are pleased to announce the first release of the Wiki2Tei software. Wiki2Tei is a converter from the mediawiki format to XML (TEI vocabulary).

The mediawiki format is used by wikimedia fundation wikis (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource), and many other wikis using the mediawiki software. Large amounts of free hight-quality structured texts are available in this format. These texts are used more and more often in NLP (natural language processing) projects. However, the mediawiki parser is oriented towards rendition and the mediawiki syntax is complex and hard to parse.

The Wiki2Tei converter makes available the information contained in wiki syntax (structuration, highlighting, etc.), and allows to properly retrieve the plain text. This conversion is intended to preserve all the properties of the original text. Wiki2Tei is closely coupled with the mediawiki software, allowing to convert all the features of the mediawiki syntax.

The Wiki2Tei converter provides a rich set of tools for converting mediawiki text from several sources (file, mediawiki database) and managing collections of files to be converted. The TEI vocabulary used is documented, according to the TEI Guidelines, in an ODD document. The code is open source and may be downloaded from the SourceForge download area:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/wiki2tei/

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=198407

The web site contains full documentation and a “demo”:

http://wiki2tei.sourceforge.net/
http://wiki2tei.sourceforge.net/demo/

A mailing list is open:

https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wiki2tei-users

Best,
Bernard Desgraupes,
Sylvain Loiseau

Instant-on startup screens

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

Ashlee Vance (by way of Siva Vaidhyanatha) discusses Splashtop from DeviceVM:

… one must suspect that Microsoft is none too pleased to see a plucky start-up trying to gain first touch with customers. It could be very frustrating for Redmond if thousands/millions of users go straight to their Yahoo! or Google e-mail without ever glancing at Windows or if they perform searches via Firefox all day long because that’s where DeviceVM pushed them…

Stretch your mind a bit more, and you could see a company like Google pushing its own desktop plans via something like the Splashtop software. Why even bother encountering Windows when you can have an instant-on machine that leads to search, e-mail, documents, photos, music and all the rest? …

We’ve seen the Splashtop software in action, and it boots as advertised. You hit the power button, and the software fires up right away. You can then opt to head toward Firefox, Skype or whatever a particular OEM decides to bundle on a machine or do nothing and allow the operating system to boot as usual. (Go get your cup of coffee.)

Mutatis mutandis

Tuesday, October 9th, 2007

Laura Cohen’s post at Library 2.0: an academic’s perspective sets out some reasons for a “training wheels culture” in librarianship. I think folks in the humanities will recognize the syndrome as well:

Experience. If you’ve had little experience learning technology on your own, it can be hard to get started. It takes a certain kind of strength to wrap your mind around a new technology skill, especially one that is somewhat beyond your present skill level. There’s a problem-solving, experimental, hard-driving, trial-and-error mindset that you need to embrace. Self-training in technology is in itself a skill that you need to cultivate by actually doing it, repeatedly.

Habit. If you’ve expected, and received, training for almost everything you’ve learned, you’ve developed a dependent mindset. The environment has fit itself around you, rather than the other way around. You’ve been enabled. Your habitually tell yourself that there is someone around to help you and that’s the way it should be. All you need to do is ask.

Roles. If certain staff become too highly associated with technology training, other staff may become passive. This makes for a difficult paradox: having technology trainers on staff is a sign of administration’s support for this staffing role, yet relying too much on these trainers can breed passivity.

Attitude. Learning new skills is fun. It really is! If you dread it, or consider it a chore, or get easily frustrated, or fear failure, then you’ll have problems.

Learned helplessness. This is always a problem when it appears, and I don’t know how, exactly, to deal with it. I’ve heard this kind of thing often enough: “I’m just not good at this.” “This is always hard for me.” “I know this isn’t my strength.” “I’m a traditional librarian.” And so on. When an individual says these things often enough, and over a period of years, this person comes to believe it. Repetition creates immutable facts on the ground.

Ability. On the other hand, let’s face it: some people are just not technically inclined. You may say they have no place in librarianship, and you may be right. But let’s think about this further. I’m terrible with numbers, strong with words. With a more open mind toward numbers, and some vigorous effort, I could probably increase my skills. But I’ll never be as good as those for whom numeric reasoning comes easy. I think it’s unrealistic to expect that every librarian will have very strong technical skills. On the other hand, the profile of our skill levels will certainly shift upward in the coming years. In the meantime, we need to face facts. Some of our colleagues are technically weaker than others and they’ll stay that way. These people have other strengths, and we should cultivate and make good use of these strengths. But we also shouldn’t entirely give up on training them in new skills.

Intrinsic difficulty of the skill. Some skills are harder to learn than others. I’m unhappy when I encounter librarians who struggle to maintain Web pages made up of a bunch of links organized into unordered lists. I’m much more understanding of librarians who need help with higher-level skills…say, for importing RSS feeds into a Web page.

Time. Some people learn nearly everything on their own. More power to them! This involves a level of commitment that not everyone can match. One part of this commitment is time, including significant time off hours. We can’t expect this of everyone. This isn’t reasonable, or even desirable. In addition, many of us are overwhelmed with job responsibilities. This is why we have trainers on staff.

Strategic direction. If your library is moving in a strategic direction that expects certain new skills, then it makes sense to provide training for them. Unfunded mandates are not good policy. In my case, I’ve been making a focused pitch for importing RSS feeds into our public Web pages. I can’t do this while at the same time saying, “Learn it on your own!” If I provide a tutorial and offer support, the chances are much greater that staff will learn the skill that I want them to learn so much. And maybe they’ll listen to other suggestions from me, if I have a history of backing up my lobbying with support.

Library culture. I left this one for last. I do think our library culture is a factor. Our profession is on the cusp. What I mean is this: we’re on the cusp of a new generation of librarians (of any age) who are expected to be – and will be – technically adept. Expected to be is an element that is absolutely crucial, and we’re not there yet. Right now, we’ve got a mixed bag of skill levels on staff because of a technology generation gap, unfortunate hiring practices, low expectations, lack of vision, and so on. There is also failed leadership. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, that our adminstrators need to set good examples. I can’t stand it when administrators require skills that they themselves have no intention of learning, or even comprehending. Even more problematic are administrators who have relatively few skills and also can’t envision, advocate for, put much importance on, or make time for developing the skills of the staff they supervise. They don’t support what they need to support in order to make crucial learning happen. Neither scenario is sustainable.

More like this, please

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

From A. A. Adams, Copyright and research: an archivangelist’s perspective, SCRIPT-ed, September 2007:

To be an academic carries with it a great deal of freedom, or at least it should. At a time when pressures on academic freedom are rife, everywhere from Australia to Zimbabwe, academics should be confronting the responsibilities that go with their cherished and fought-for freedoms. That responsibility is to disseminate one’s work as widely as possible, to hold it up for criticism and to allow others to build on it. To do so demands that we hold Open Access to our articles as a categorical imperative and not allow the tail of academic publishing to wag the dog of academic communication.

(Hat tip, Peter Suber.) 

English-Latin-English dictionaries

Monday, October 1st, 2007

from the mailbag:

My name is Silvio and I’ve recently concluded a set of English-Latin-English dictionaries which I thought you could be interested in sharing with your site’s visitors. The dictionaries provide clear and precise translations and are absolutely free of charge.

Latin Dictionary: http://www.babylon.com/define/112/Latin-Dictionary.html

If you have any feedback on them, I’d be happy to hear.

Regards,

Silvio Branco

(Note: I cannot vouch for these dictionaries but simply pass along the announcement.) 

Vicipaedia

Monday, October 1st, 2007

from the CHE:

Latin Lovers Flock to Vicipaedia It’s taken only a few years for Wikipedia to become one of the world’s most translated documents: Sections of the site now appear in about 250 languages, including regional dialects like Quechua, Xhosa, Nauruan, and Kalaallisut. The translation projects, fledgling though they may be, serve real communities across the world. But what to make of Vicipaedia, a bustling site whose contributors have translated more than 15,000 Wikipedia entries into Latin? The Wall Street Journal offers an entertaining profile of Vicipaedia’s editors, who are remarkably devoted to a project that is “a slightly odd thing to do in this century,” as one translator admits. Most readers and contributors use Vicipaedia to test their language skills, not to conduct real research. So the site’s content is, well, eclectic: Entries about Roman history and mythology rub up against those on beer pong and Paris Hilton. There’s plenty of debate about neologisms — editors can’t seem to agree on the proper Latin word for “computer” — but Latin experts told The Journal that the quality of the translations is surprisingly good. –Brock Read

Mr. Rocchio’s coda: “Latin has a tradition of 2,700 years … and we don’t want that to end. Latin isn’t dead, it just smells funny.”

… and Why We Should Worry

Monday, October 1st, 2007

Siva Vaidhyanathan has posted on his blog, the Googlization of Everything, an interview he did with a Charlottesville newspaper. The interview reveals some of his concerns about Google. An example:

More than 20 big university libraries have signed contracts with Google, in which they’re allowing Google’s people to scan large collections of their materials… This concerns me because while the universities think they’re getting this great service for free, it’s Google that’s getting the gift. Google is getting hundreds of years of riches that the state of Michigan and California have funded. Google’s getting all this content for free and gets to control access to it, gets to control the manner of presentation, gets to control the formats and gets to control the terms of use. I think that’s a bad deal for these libraries.

Wikipedia’s Awkward Adolescence

Monday, October 1st, 2007

Thoughtful new critique by Karen G. Schneider (of Free Range Librarian) in CIO:

Like a startup maturing into a real business, Wikipedia’s corporate culture seems conflicted between its role as a harmless nouveau-digital experiment and its broader ambitions.

Worth a read.

Open Access publication, anyone?

Saturday, September 29th, 2007

The second footnote to a review of Wolfgang Bernard and Christiane Reitz (edd.), Werner Krenkel: Naturalia non turpia. Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece and Rome / Schriften zur antiken Kultur- und Sexualwissenschaft. Spudasmata 113. Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Olms, 2006 by Bernard Kytzler caught my attention:

Werner Krenkel, born 1926, has recently published, for financial reasons (!) in an electronic version (!), his monumental work on Varro, a disc not on the market but available ‘for friends and colleagues’ from Heinrich- Schliemann Institut, University of Rostock: Marcus Terentius Varro, Saturae Menippeae, lateinisch/deutsch, mit Anmerkungen (Rostock 2001). It offers, after a long and detailed introduction, the full text and translation of the 591 fragments surviving from Varro’s 150 satires, plus a profound commentary on each of them. The work is rounded out by an extensive index and a rich bibliography. Krenkel’s collection ‘Naturalia’ discussed here contains a specimen of this electronic publication: Nr. 23, pp. 495-537.

Version control, visualized

Friday, September 28th, 2007

A nice visual overview of the purposes and mechanisms for version control, from Better Explained.

Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative and Digital Library Program of UCLA

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative and the Digital Library Program of the University of California, Los Angeles, are pleased to announce their successful proposal to the Institute for Museum and Library Services program “National Leadership Grants: Building Digital Resources” for funding of a two-year project dedicated to improving data management and archiving tools in Humanities research.

Project Title: “Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative: Second Generation”

The UCLA University Library and UCLA’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures will create the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative: Second Generation (CDLI 2). The project will migrate 450,000 legacy archival and access images and metadata from CDLI to UCLA’s Digital Library Content System, standardizing and upgrading the metadata to improve discovery and enable content archiving within the California Digital Library’s Digital Preservation Repository. The project will add 7,000 digital artifacts with cuneiform inscriptions, including collections housed at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute and in Syrian national museums. This project will ensure the long-term preservation of text inscribed on endangered ancient cuneiform tablets. (see the IMLS notice of grants in this cycle)

Principal Investigators:

Stephen Davison
Robert K. Englund

Exclusivity

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

Hearing Mojo is not happy:

I can’t believe Apple failed to make its iPhone compatible with either hearing aids or cochlear implants. I’m in the market for a mobile phone again and just discovered the lack of compatibility. Given all the hype surrounding the iPhone launch, I’m surprised there haven’t been more complaints, other than the strong objection I just found on Paula Rosenthal’s HearingExchange site, some chatter on Apple forums, and a complaint made to the FCC by the Hearing Loss Association of America. HLAA has done the most advocacy for hearing-aid compatibility (HAC) regulations, which now mandate 50 percent of manufacturers’ handsets meet minimum M3 compatibility standards. The M3 and M4 ratings mean there’s no buzzing when you listen to the phone with your hearing-aid microphone on, and T3 and T4 ratings mean the phone works with the telecoils in your hearing aids. But according to the HLAA complaint: “Apple has now entered the scene and is predicted to shake up the entire wireless industry. Yet they are not, nor have ever been, involved in any discussions regarding HAC requirements.” Steve Jobs is known for his arrogance and inflexibility when it comes to the design of his products. Apple’s treatment of the hearing-impaired population is a great example. What a disappointment.

outsourcing, again

Monday, September 17th, 2007

Cory Doctorow, “Scroogled: Google controls your e-mail, your videos, your calendar, your searches… What if it controlled your life?”

Excerpt:

“Evening,” Greg said, handing the man his sweaty passport. The officer grunted and swiped it, then stared at his screen, tapping. A lot. He had a little bit of dried food at the corner of his mouth and his tongue crept out and licked at it.

“Want to tell me about June 1998?”

Greg looked up from his Departures. “I’m sorry?”

“You posted a message to alt.burningman on June 17, 1998, about your plan to attend a festival. You asked, ‘Are shrooms really such a bad idea?’”

Diamond Synchrotron used to read ancient texts

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

(Spotted by Gregg Schwender and seen in a Diamond Lab press release.)

The ultra-powerful I22 Non-crystalline Diffraction beamline (as best as I understand it an application of the laser particle accellerator that produces highly concentrated pure light for scanning at nanoscopic resolutions) is being applied to the reading of damaged parchment and other ancient and at-risk documents. The synchrotron can analyse the condition of collagen in paper or vellum and determine the patterns of any potentially corrosive ink; this is particularly valuable in cases of very fragile texts, such as those partially eaten away by iron gall ink, or ancient dessicated manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I first heard about this story–albeit in very vague terms–at a party last night, and I have to say that my first reaction was disbelief. I assumed that the speaker (neither a digital humanist nor a manuscript scholar) had misunderstood or misrepresented the story of a particle accellerator the size of four football pitches being used to read the Dead Sea Scrolls. Surely the expense involved would just never be spent on something as niche as manuscript studies? (Not to mention that I know excellent results are already being achieved using standard medical imaging technology.) I apologise to my nameless source for my lack of faith. I guess I need reminding occasionally that even people with big and expensive fish to fry can share our obsession with digital and humanistic concerns.

Stanford Humanities Center – Digital Humanities Fellowship

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

The Stanford Humanities Center seeks to award one Digital Humanities Fellowship for the academic year 2008-2009 to a junior or senior scholar.

The Digital Humanities Fellowship reflects the Stanford Humanities Center’s commitment to supporting new directions in humanities research. The fellowship is intended for humanities scholars whose research methods are critically shaped by information technology. Projects should be oriented to producing new research outcomes rather than focusing primarily on the creation of archives or software. Appropriate projects will approach significant questions in humanistic study with the aid of new research tools or methodologies.

E-Science, Imaging Technology and Ancient Documents

Saturday, September 1st, 2007

Updated version of the Oxford e-science posts with the corrected deadline forwarded to me by Marilyn Deegan:

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

FACULTY OF CLASSICS

Sub-Faculty of Ancient History

E-Science, Imaging Technology and Ancient Documents

Applications are invited for two posts for which funding has been secured through the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities E-Science initiative to support research on the application of Information Technology to ancient documents. Both posts are attached to a project which will develop a networked software system that can support the imaging, documentation, and interpretation of damaged texts from the ancient world, principally Greek and Latin papyri, inscriptions and writing tablets. The work will be conducted under the supervision of Professors Alan Bowman FBA, Sir Michael Brady FRS FREng (University of Oxford) and Dr. Melissa Terras (University College London).

1. A Doctoral Studentship for a period of 4 years from 1 January, 2008. The studentship will be held in the Faculty of Classics (Sub-Faculty of Ancient History) and supported at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the Oxford E-Research Centre. The Studentship award covers both the cost of tuition fees at Home/EU rates and a maintenance grant. To be eligible for a full award, the student must have been ordinarily resident in the UK for a period of 3 years before the start of the award.

2. A postdoctoral Research Assistantship for a period of 3 years from 1 January, 2008. The post will be held in the Faculty of Classics (Sub-Faculty of Ancient History) and supported at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the Oxford E-Research Centre. The salary will be in the range of £26,666 – £31,840 p.a. Applicants must have expertise in programming and Informatics and an interest in the application of imaging technology and signal-processing to manuscripts and documents.

The deadline for receipt of applications is 21 September 2007. Further details about both posts, the project, the qualifications required and the method of application are available from Ms Ghislaine Rowe, Graduate Studies Administrator, Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles’ , Oxford OX1 3LU (01865 288397, ghislaine.rowe@classics.ox.ac.uk). It is hoped that interviews will be held and the appointments made on 11 October.

2nd Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

From Martin Mueller at Northwestern (full disclosure: I’ll be a speaker):

The program for the Second Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science has now been set, and you can see it at http://dhcs.northwestern.edu/index.html.

The Colloquium will take place on Sunday and Monday, October 21-22, 2007 at Northwestern University. This is an event jointly sponsored by the Illinois Institute for Technology, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. Registration is free, and you are cordially invited to attend.

Information about logistics will appear shortly on the web site. You may also contact the conference coordinator, Nathan Mead (n-mead2 at northwestern dot edu).

There still is room for poster sessions, and we will be delighted to receive and review submissions on a rolling basis. Please send them to dhcs-submissions at listhost.uchicago.edu.

The theme of this year’s colloquium is “Exploring the scholarly query potential of high quality text and image archives in a collaborative environment.” The presentations range widely across cultures and technologies. There are digital surrogates of Mesopotamian cylinder seals and of 3,000 clay statuettes from a Chinese Buddhist temple that make you see things you could not easily see “in the flesh.” How to find readable and manipulable representations of the symbols that appear in Isaac Newton’s alchemical writings. How to explore the “countless links” that are at the heart of the Orlando Project about Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present. How to make the history of North Carolina speak in different ways when the print records (a massive work of late nineteenth century scholarship) are translated into a digital medium.

A special session on Monday will explore the different ways in which quite similar technologies of text mining support different goals in legal, literary, and business analysis, and it will ask what these different approaches can learn from each other.

The keynote speakers, Matt Kirschenbaum (The Remaking of Reading) and Lew Lancaster (Beyond 2-D Text/Plan: The Chinese Buddhist in 3-D) nicely define the range of topics. Ray Siemens will sum it all up.

E-Science, Imaging Technology and Ancient Documents

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007

See and forwarded from Classicists mailing list

————————————————–

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

FACULTY OF CLASSICS

Sub-Faculty of Ancient History

E-Science, Imaging Technology and
Ancient Documents

Applications are invited for two posts for which funding has been secured through the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities E-Science initiative to support research on the application of Information Technology to ancient documents. Both posts are attached to a project which will develop a networked software system that can support the imaging, documentation, and interpretation of damaged texts from the ancient world, principally Greek and Latin papyri, inscriptions and writing tablets. The work will be conducted under the supervision of Professors Alan Bowman FBA, Sir Michael Brady FRS FREng (University of Oxford) and and Dr. Melissa Terras (University College London).

1. A Doctoral Studentship for a period of 4 years from 1 January, 2008. The studentship will be held in the Faculty of Classics (Sub-Faculty of Ancient History) and supported at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the Oxford E-Research Centre. The Studentship award covers both the cost of tuition fees at Home/EU rates and a maintenance grant. To be eligible for a full award, the student must have been ordinarily resident in the UK for a period of 3 years before the start of the award.

2. A postdoctoral Research Assistantship for a period of 3 years from 1 January, 2008. The post will be held in the Faculty of Classics (Sub-Faculty of Ancient History) and supported at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and the Oxford E-Research Centre. The salary will be in the range of £26,666 – £31,840 p.a. Applicants must have expertise in programming and Informatics and an interest in the application of imaging technology and signal-processing to manuscripts and documents.

The deadline for receipt of applications is 21 September 2007. Further details about both posts, the project, the qualifications required and the method of application are available from Ms Ghislaine Rowe, Graduate Studies Administrator, Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St Giles’ , Oxford OX1 3LU (01865 288397, ghislaine.rowe@classics.ox.ac.uk). It is hoped that interviews will be held and the appointments made on 11 October.

Professor Alan Bowman
Camden Professor of Ancient History
Brasenose College,
Oxford OX1 4AJ
+44 (0)1865 277874

Director, Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents
The Stelios Ioannou School for Research in Classical and Byzantine Studies
66 St Giles’
Oxford OX1 3LU
+44 (0)1865 610227

Moving toward greater usefulness…

Monday, August 20th, 2007

from Inside Google Book Search:

Today we launched a new feature for Book Search to help more people access the world’s great public domain works. Whenever you find an out-of-copyright book in our index, you’ll see a “View plain text” link, which lets anyone access the text layer of the book. As Dr. T.V. Raman explains on the main Google blog, this opens the book to adaptive technologies such as screen readers and Braille display, allowing visually impaired users to read these books just as easily as users with sight.

This is an exciting step for us in our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. To learn more about Google’s efforts to make books and other digitized content more accessible to everyone, check out Dr. Raman’s full post.

More on openness and Google Books

Friday, August 17th, 2007

As a follow-up to Dan Cohen/s post yesterday in which he lamented the lack of an API to Google’s book digitization efforts, there’s further discussion today, in the form of an interview of Brewster Kahle by Andrew Richard Albanese, Scan this book!  Library Journal, August 17, 2007:

The Library of Congress also announced it is going to work with the Open Content Alliance. That’s what it takes. It takes guts on the part of our leadership to keep librarians first-class members of this information world, not just in a service role of feeding the machine and then checking out at the end of the day because everything’s going to be handled by some great search engine in the sky. No. It should be handled by us. We have the tools to build this open world right now. We can invest in ourselves, in the traditions that we come from. This is a choice.

Learn a foreign language on the cheap

Thursday, August 16th, 2007

from Lifehacker:

The No Thick Manuals wiki details how to learn a language efficiently using two free, open source applications. The first is jVLT (java Vocabulary Learning Tool), a completely cross platform flash card application. The second is StarDict, a Windows/Linux-only dictionary that provides an impressive array of features and dictionaries. Granted, most of us would require some textbooks and/or audio supplements, but anyone learning a language needs a good dictionary and some flash cards, and these free desktop applications sound a lot simpler than making flash cards by hand and manually looking up words in your dictionary.

Not to be missed: 2

Thursday, August 16th, 2007

In “Google Books: Champagne or Sour Grapes?,” Dan Cohen provides some of his usual thoughtful and well-stated correctives to the latest anti-Google jeremiad making the rounds, Paul Duguid’s “Inheritance and loss? A brief survey of Google Books.”

Complaining about the quality, thoroughness, and fidelity of Google’s (public) scans distracts us from the larger problem of Google Books. As I have argued repeatedly in this space, the real problem—especially for those in the digital humanities but also for many others—is that Google Books is not open.

rtwt.

Not to be missed: 1

Thursday, August 16th, 2007

I hadn’t realized until just now that Melissa Terras is writing in her own blog, but its very good to know. I’ve added her to the blogroll on the right under Digital Studies.

Open access and convenience

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007

This CHE piece caught my eye, esp. one of the suggestions made as to why people may not be using library-adminstered electronic resources so much:

The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies’ list of Top 100 Tools for Learning — culled from top-10 charts created by e-learning experts — names a wide array of tech tools that professors have come to love. Among the items that made the cut are Web browsers, e-mail clients, RSS feeders, blogging programs, and, of course, Microsoft’s evergreen PowerPoint presentation software. But online library resources, which would seem like a good fit for e-learners, are notably absent from the master list. What gives? “It’s not as if the responding experts ignored information-retrieval tools,” writes Steven Bell at ACRLog. “Both Google and Google Scholar are on the top-100 list. And it’s not as if these experts wouldn’t know something about library databases.” Mr. Bell, the associate university librarian for research and instructional services at Temple University, argues that librarians just haven’t done a good job of advertising their online databases and e-journal collections as instructional tools. But Stephen Downes, the author of OLDaily, says the lack of library services on the list could be evidence of bad tools, not a lack of publicity. Mr. Downes, a senior researcher for Canada’s National Research Council, says he has access to a major online library portal, but that he has used the services only twice in six years. “The reason,” he writes, “is that it is not convenient, not even remotely, especially with the layers of security involved in protecting publisher’s intellectual property.” If digital library resources should, in fact, be thought of as instructional technologies, are they actually meeting the needs of e-learners and other scholars?  –Brock Read

(Emphasis added.)

Change to British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships Scheme

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007

Picked this up and copied it from mailing lists:

From: British Academy [mailto:britishacademy@email.britac.ac.uk]
Sent: Wed 08/08/2007 02:43

Change to British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme

The timetable for applications for British Academy Postdoctoral fellowships has been brought forward in order to provide for earlier announcements, to give universities more time to plan to integrate Postdoctoral Fellows into departmental teaching and other programmes. The process will be conducted over two stages instead of one, in order to reduce the burden on HEIs. The deadline for outline submissions is 15 October 2007 for awards to be taken up from September 2008. Institutions are required to countersign outline applications but need provide no further information at this stage. Applicants will be notified of the outcome in December 2007, and those who successfully pass the initial selection stage will be invited to submit full bids by the deadline of 28 February 2008. Institutions are required to provide detailed information, including a complete statement of support and the financial appendix showing Full Economic Costs (FEC), only at this second stage. Awards will be announced in May 2008.

Details and application forms are available from www.britac.ac.uk/funding/guide/pdfells.html

Contact: Research Posts Department 020 7969 5265 or email:
posts@britac.ac.uk

The British Academy
10 Carlton House
London SW1Y 5AH

Tel: 020 7969 5200
Fax: 020 7969 5300
Web: www.britac.ac.uk
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