Educators at Discovery Education’s learning summit last month in Maryland talk of how digitization requires strategy and training—not just putting a device into student’s hands.
Discovery Education Summit: We Don’t Just Needs Tablets, We Need A Digital Game Plan
By on March 4, 2014
EBSCO Rolls Out New Research Starters Feature for EDS
By on February 26, 2014
EBSCO has rolled out Research Starters, a new feature for EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) that presents student researchers with short, citable summaries on frequently searched topics. Drawn from sources such as Salem Press, Encyclopedia Britannica, and American National Biography, more than 62,000 of these 500- to 1,500-word summaries are accessible, offering students an authoritative overview of their chosen subject, as well as links to other research starter summaries, or peer reviewed research where they can delve deeper into a topic.
The OPAC is Dead
By on February 6, 2014
Anyone who has heard me speak in the last decade or so has likely heard my mini-diatribe against the acronym “OPAC”. Besides being impenetrable jargon, it is thoroughly anachronistic. It owes its life to an extremely brief period of modern librarianship when we had automated circulation systems that didn’t have a publicly available instantiation. That […]
OCLC Introduces WorldCat Discovery Services
By on January 31, 2014
OCLC on January 22 announced WorldCat Discovery Services (WDS), a suite of cloud-based applications that combines FirstSearch and WorldCat Local. Beginning in March, the suite will offer FirstSearch subscribers access to a central index that represents nearly 2,000 e-content collections containing articles, ebooks, and other content from providers including EBSCO, Gale, and ProQuest. In total, WDS will enable the discovery of 1.3 billion electronic, digital, and physical resources in libraries around the world, using a single search.
Librarypedia: The Future of Libraries and Wikipedia
By on January 25, 2014
The Wikipedia Library is an open research hub started in 2010 when Credo Reference donated 500 free research accounts to Wikipedia’s most active editors. Partnerships with HighBeam, Questia, JSTOR, and the Cochrane Library followed. Now, the Wikipedia Library is developing into a portal to connect editors with libraries, open access resources, paywalled databases, digital reference tools, and research experts. Two of the project’s leaders discuss the potential for collaboration between libraries and Wikipedia, as well as the new Visiting Scholars pilot program.
A Wellcome Trove of Images
By on January 20, 2014
The highly regarded Wellcome Library in the United Kingdom has released a new web site with over 100,000 digital images for viewing, and in some cases, downloading. The images include “manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements,” as well as contemporary images. Unlike most web sites that provide access to digital or digitized images, the […]
ProQuest Launches Free Version of Flow, a Cloud-Based Document Management Platform
By on January 13, 2014
A version of Flow— ProQuest ‘s cloud-based collaboration and document management tool—is now available for free to researchers, including those affiliated with non-subscribing institutions. Launched in mid-2013 as an alternative to Mendeley and Zotero, the platform helps researchers discover, store, and organize academic articles, citations, and metadata downloaded from electronic databases, and collaborate with other researchers in a cloud-based environment.
Colorado Library Consortium, SkyRiver Partnership Offers Bibliographic Services to Small Libraries
By on December 17, 2013
The Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC) recently announced an agreement with library automation software provider Innovative Interfaces to make SkyRiver bibliographic services available to libraries throughout the state. SkyRiver will facilitate a comprehensive audit of CLiC’s AspenCat union catalog, and ultimately, will offer the consortium’s 400 libraries a source of cataloging records.
Follow the Conference Hashtag: My 10 Favorite Tech Tools for Educators
By on December 10, 2013
Sarah Ludwig, dean of digital and library services at the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, CT, keeps up with tech tools by osmosis—and by following conference session hashtags on Twitter and watching resources stream by. Here are her 10 current favorites.
Book App Alliance Aids Discovery of Kids’ Interactive Books
By on October 29, 2013
The Book App Alliance aims to help locate quality book apps amid the tides of Disney, Dora, and Dr. Seuss products. Alliance founders also want to foster best practices.
