Today, corporate users are not the only ones rapidly embracing mobile tablets for daily use--this transition has spilled over into the education sector. Schools have begun incorporating mobile devices such as iPads and other tablets into their curriculum. While this trend brings new and exciting educational opportunities, administrators and…

Every U.S. state and the District of Columbia has a law on the books that protects a library borrower's privacy, both an ethical and legal obligation of the library. In addition, FERPA further restricts access to users' records. Getting the message across to staff can be a challenge, especially if you employ students or volunteers who may not…

There is an increasing focus at the state and federal levels on linking data across the P-20/Workforce spectrum to help inform policies and practices. This primer is intended to provide policymakers with: (1) An overview of the status of states vis-a-vis the linking of postsecondary data to K-12 and workforce data; (2) A subset of questions…

Lecture capture technology has advanced to a point where implementing a solution can be disarmingly simple. But it is important for faculty and administrators not to be lulled into a false sense of security--recording faculty and guest lectures still comes with its share of legal issues covering copyright, intellectual property rights,…

In an era of demands for greater accountability in higher education, an increasingly polarized political environment, and scandals such as that at Penn State, access to information is becoming everyone's business, affecting public and independent institutions alike. Although Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) demands are often annoying or…

This article reviews the history of open access (OA) policies and examines the current status of mandate policy implementations. It finds that hundreds of policies have been proposed and adopted at various organizational levels and many of them have shown a positive effect on the rate of repository content accumulation. However, it also detects…

This study was designed to generate a deeper understanding of data sharing by targeting faculty members who had already made data publicly available. During interviews, crop scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign were asked why they decided to share data, why they chose a data sharing method (e. g., supplementary file,…

"Rent or buy?" is a question people ask about everything from housing to textbooks. It is also a question universities must consider when it comes to high-performance computing (HPC). With the advent of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft Windows HPC Server, Rackspace's OpenStack, and other cloud-based services, researchers now have…

One of the many challenges that content creators and repository administrators are both struggling with in this "born digital" information environment is the "ownership" of content. After several years of engaging directly with researchers across their campus and providing seminars on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy,…

More than a year and a half after the University of Minnesota made headlines when an administrator halted the premiere of an environmental documentary, controversy and questions persist at the Twin Cities university. "Troubled Waters: A Mississippi River Story" took nearly four years to make. It explores how agricultural runoff and…

At the University of South Carolina Upstate, two librarians created a series of workshops to proactively prevent plagiarism. To reach distance education students, online workshops were developed in Blackboard including basic and advanced workshops for lower and upper-level courses. The workshops are intended to introduce students to the concepts…

Copyright is extremely complex, and it is difficult to convey its complexities in a clear and concise form. Through decades of experience, archivists developed informal best practices for dealing with copyright in the analog world; however the application of copyright in the digital environment is evolving in response to rapidly changing…

Background/Context: Every state in the nation has legal requirements, state "sunshine laws," to ensure accountability and fairness in institutions receiving state funds and operating under state authority. These laws have come to significantly influence the ways in which the business of higher education is conducted. Purpose/Objective/Research…

The aim of this study is to identify achieved successes, existing gaps and possible prospects of implementing the principle of transparency by Russian universities. It was focused upon the information transparency of educational activities from the perspective of legal requirements and interests of applicants and university students. The analysis…

Within the context of "Cambridge University Press et al. v. Patton et al.", this article provides the rationale for the academic distribution of scholarly articles without requesting copyright permission or paying the corresponding fees. The fair use of scholarly articles is examined legally, historically, and in an economic context. This article…