These days, "data-driven decision making" is on every school district's buzzword bingo game board. Accountability pressures and lean budgets make translating data into information a major focus of school systems that are trying to improve district outcomes in all areas. As such, data warehousing has become an essential district tool. Historically…

An unprecedented amount of information encompassing almost every facet of human activities across the world is generated daily in the form of zeros and ones, and that is often the only form in which such information is recorded. A good fraction of this information needs to be preserved for periods of time ranging from a few years to centuries.…

Over the past several decades, millions of digital objects of significant scientific, economic, cultural, and historic value have been published and distributed to libraries and archives on removable media. Providing long-term access to these documents, media files, and software executables is an increasingly complex task because of dependencies…

Gathering and displaying governance documents and photos online can help educate the public, promote transparency, and preserve historical artifacts. Under the leadership of a board chair with lifelong interest in history and respect for the historical record, the Office of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas System has discovered that…

School systems face many decisions in developing and maintaining learning environments that create success for all students. From district operations to the classroom, district leaders implement solutions and take action based on the information they have at hand. While there is no shortage of data, turning that data into useful information is as…

Carol Harrison is the registrar at the College of Southern Maryland, and back in the days of paper, she used to have a problem: keeping track of students' records, especially as they moved from one department to another, and through one process or system after another. It wasn't that the records disappeared; they were just, well, occasionally hard…

The New Media Consortium's Horizon Project is an ongoing research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact in education and other industries around the world over a five-year time period. The chief products of the project are the "Horizon Reports", an annual series of publications…

"I saved my presentation in my personal drive on the server last night, but now I can't find it. It just seems to be gone. Can you get it back?" "It looks like the mail server is corrupted. When was the last backup?" These sorts of questions, whether from faculty, students, or IT staff, can be an IT nightmare, or they can set…

Computer literacy has evolved from writing simple BASIC programs to using desktop productivity applications. The shift from mainframe to personal computer brought about the need to rethink computer literacy courses to introduce basic skills and familiarity using desktop productivity applications. While these skills remain important, the recent…

The literature on information literacy often assumes that there is an inherent link between the need for information literacy and what is commonly referred to as the information explosion. This assumed link is reflected in programs of information literacy instruction offered by academic libraries. This article argues that the basic concepts of…

There is much speculation that the development of institutional repositories will impact on or even change the traditional scholarly communication process. The purpose of this conversation is to introduce the reader to the use of and response to institutional repositories which were initiated by the Open Access Initiative. The concept of…

Digital photographs can take up a lot of hard-drive space. In light of this fact, many people are choosing to store their photos online. There are several ways to store pictures on the Web, the most popular being online photo storage services. These services have many benefits. They offer a safe place for photos in the event that one's computer…

Describes an extensible object-oriented view system that supports the integration of both structured and unstructured data sources in either the multidatabase or data warehouse environment. Discusses related work and data mining issues. (AEF)

Business intelligence derived from data warehousing and data mining has become one of the most strategic management tools today, providing organizations with long-term competitive advantages. Business school curriculums and popular database textbooks cover data warehousing, but the examples and problem sets typically are small and unrealistic. The…

Developments in the representation of music, in notated and acoustic forms, in computerized databases suggest a need for nontext searching. Examines aspects of music notation and sound and reviews literature concerned with basic considerations of musical document representation; systems for encoding music for storage, regeneration, and analysis;…