Libraries receive very little attention in the report, yet this report confirms that the impact of "affordability" on libraries will be great.  As colleges and universities strive to [...more]

In this month's Library Journal, Jonathan Rochkind does an excellent job summing up implementation considerations for open source software. [...more]

Dashboards and Benchmarks: An Assessment Working Group Update for Library Directors [...more]

• Benchmarks and Dashboards Presentation, 10/15/2008

Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a new report -- The Academic Workplace -- in which it has gathered information and best practices on human resources practices at colleges and universities. Included are stories related to organizational communication, strategic planning, employee benefits and more. Definitely worth exploring.

Source

• The Academic Workplace. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In every generation there are futurists who help us to put future developments into a broader context, and who provide us with an understanding as to how we can “predict” the future, and more importantly, how we can use some principles to help us put those changes into context. Over twenty years ago I posited some underlying characteristics about the power of predictions , and principles for recognizing which predictions are most likely to prevail in libraries. [...more]

Accessing the NELIwiki

Anyone may access the NELIwiki, though only users of specific interest groups may add and edit pages to their group wikis.  Also, only registered users may submit comments to wiki pages as with other pages on the Web site.

Create New Pages

To create a new page, enter the URL for a nonexistent page, such as:
http://www.nelinet.net/wiki/My_New_Page

Special Characters [...more]

The Library As Space and the Virtual Library

An important consideration for library service will be the concerning the policies for physical library collections, making web access more efficient and effective, and redesigning the physical library space so that space is more responsive to the needs of the user community. [...more]

Transition Libraries from a Collection to a Service Orientation

Peer Production

In the July 2006 issue, Chris Anderson in Wired named peer production as one of the top six trends that are changing the world. Since then, everything from Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, and political blogs to tagging sites and virtual libraries (such as Shelfari) have boomed with content that is being generated constantly by amateurs who do their work for free, which is having a profound impact as to what is available to libraries and how the publishing industry will rework itself in future. [...more]

Digital Book Projects

Universities Expanding Their Adoption of E-Books

Pat Hawthorne (human resources director at UCLA) and Nicole A. Cooke (instruction librarian at Montclair State University in New Jersey) discuss five microtrends affecting libraries and information organizations today:

1. Working retired
2. Extreme commuters
3. Stay-at-home workers
4. Wordy women
5. Ardent amazons

Read More... [...more]

Joanne Oud, Instructional Technology Librarian at Wilfrid Laurier Univrsity in Ontario, studied new academic librarians and their organizational socialization.  Her findings, though not shocking, neatly quantify the human resource management issues faced by libraries and information organizations across the U.S.  Findings include higher expectations regarding performance feedback than experienced, a strong desire to understand organizational decision making processes couple with a lack of understanding of the same, and the importance of flexibility, independence and variety in librarian pos [...more]

Chris Anderson: Everything Is Free

The Future of Education

The  world of education, and higher education in particular, has never been known to  adjust to changing times with great speed.   Nonetheless, significant changes  are beginning to occur.  To name but a few, the “open movement,” is burgeoning, not only in open access and open source software, but also in open courseware and textbooks.  Clearly the collaborative learning continues to expand, beginning in  primary grades, but going well beyond to include higher ed [...more]

Assessment and Accreditation

Student Research

Welcome

Welcome to the Planning, Assessment & Accreditation Wiki

I hope that we will be able to use this wiki to:

1. Share ideas
2. Accumulate best practices
3. Plan events

- Spohn [...more]

Social Networking

Gaming, 3D and Augmented Reality

The use of gaming technologies, once the province of teens and nerds, increasingly is a part of online life. Whether in Second Life or on numerous gaming sites, gaming is playing an increasingly important role in everything from human interface design to navigation – and these developments are set to accelerate rapidly. Rather than superimposing gaming technologies on existing technologies, the most effective use will occur when services and systems are rebuilt from the ground up. [...more]

Mobile Computing Will Overtake Personal Computing

Within the past decade mobile phone use exploded in countries that previously had little-or-no landline infrastructure. Today, even in developed countries many people are dropping their landlines in favor of going “mobile only.” Mobile computing has become more practical than ever before, and a challenge will be to optimize the use of such technologies to enable effective research. [...more]

Inpexpensive Laptop Computers

High Performance Storage and Computing Systems

Privacy Issues and Personal Data Security

As the Internet commerce grew, there was an accelerated willingness of people to give away increasing amounts of personal information (both intentionally and unintentionally). Major security breaches have also been reported at universities, where databases about students have been hacked. Between January 2005 and June 2, 2008, Privacy Rights recorded an astounding 227,115,680 records containing sensitive personal information involved in security breaches in the U.S. alone. [...more]

Societal Changes and Libraries: the JISC Report

In January 2008, the British Library and JISC issued the results of a study that was intended to gather and assess the available evidence to establish whether or not, the `Google generation’ are searching for and researching content in new ways and whether new ways of researching content will prove to be any different from the ways that existing researchers and scholars carry out their work. Some of the key findings include: [...more]

Generation Y: Unique Social Attributes That Shape Their Interactions

In both developed and developing countries, the generation that is now coming into adulthood (sometimes called “Generation Y”, “The Gamer Generation,” “Digital Natives" or “The Google Generation”) is the first generation that has grown up in a world where the Internet has always been present. [...more]

Rising Costs, Inflation, Recession

Societal and Economic Issues

• What services changes will be necessary to engage younger users who often prefer online forms of interactions?
• How will rising costs affect in-person and remote use of the library, its resources and its services?

Technology Issues [...more]