During his life and career as a muckraking journalist in Washington, Jack Anderson cultivated secret sources throughout the halls of government--sources who passed on information that allowed Anderson to investigate and write about Watergate, CIA assassination schemes, and countless scandals. His syndicated column, Washington Merry-Go-Round,…

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to summarize the findings of a survey of UK universities about how their websites are managed and resourced, which technologies are in use, and what are seen as the main issues and priorities. Design/methodology/approach: The paper is based on a web-based questionnaire distributed in summer 2006, which received…

Technology-savvy instructors often require students to create Web pages or videos, tasks that require finding materials such as images, music, or text on the Web, reusing them, and then republishing them in a technique that author Howard Pitler calls "remixing." However, this requires both the student and the instructor to deal with often thorny…

Governments, public funders of research and universities worldwide are increasingly recognising that improving the dissemination of research raises their research profile and contributes to national competitiveness. The traditional system of research publishing is inefficient, uncompetitive and restrictive. It limits access by researchers and…

The academic research mission requires an open environment to flourish, and the academic teaching mission obligates educators in higher education to spark ethical thinking and to inculcate the appropriate use of new technologies among all of their constituents, especially students. There is no better place to begin those lessons than in the…

"ARL" is the bimonthly report on research library issues and actions from ARL (Association of Research Libraries), CNI (Coalition of Networked Information), and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). "ARL" reports on current issues of interest to academic and research library administrators, staff and users; higher…

The Fifth Annual Educause Current Issues Survey ranked "security and identity management" near the top of the list of critical IT challenges on campus today. Recognition of the crucial importance of securing networked resources led Internet2 to establish its Middleware Initiative (I2MI) in 1999. While Internet2 was founded to develop and deploy…

Most universities in Canada are spending enormous amounts of effort collecting vast amounts of data, but are still--in some quarters--perceived to be unable to report data effectively. In other countries, this kind of problem has been resolved in two different ways. But in Canada, this hasn't happened. The purpose of this paper is to shed some…

The purpose of these protocols is to assist in providing guidance to PMRT members and Sub-groups in relation to seeking approval for the publication of documents of the Performance Measurement and Reporting Taskforce (PMRT) or of its predecessor the National Education Performance Monitoring Taskforce (NEPMT). These protocols complement the…

In the United Kingdom over the past few years there has been a dramatic growth of national and regional repositories to collect and disseminate resources related to teaching and learning. Most notable of these are the Joint Information Systems Committee's Online Repository for [Learning and Teaching] Materials as well as the Higher Education…

October is national Cyber Security Awareness Month, and for the world of higher education, that means it is time to take a look at defense systems and plan for the future. Clearly, more planning is needed now than ever before. According to the majority of IT market research firms, phishing and identity theft have leapfrogged spam and spyware as…

At Dartmouth College, the author teaches a course called "Security and Privacy." Its early position in the overall computer science curriculum means the course needs to be introductory, and the author can't assume the students possess an extensive computer science background. These constraints leave the author with a challenge: to construct…

The review and negotiation of license agreements has become a time-consuming but necessary part of the job of providing access to the electronic information resources required by libraries' patrons. The nature of these agreements may pose a number of barriers to the development of fully integrated collections. This article presents a fictitious…

The ancient Romans had it right. The underlying relationships between contracting parties were considered so important among Roman citizens that breaking a contract was considered a serious offense: The breaching party forfeited social position and property, and, if necessary, his family was expected to make good on his contractual promises. In…

The impact that electronic information technologies have had on scholarly communications and university libraries is assessed. Early predictions that the dominance of commercial publishers would decline and journal prices would fall have not been realised. The development of institutional repositories have had limited success in making the…