CULTech Blog

One of the reports on higher ed and technology that I make a point of reading every year when it comes out is The ECAR (EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research) Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology. I read it because it never fails to give me at least one “aha” moment that shifts my [...]

Discussion on the Google Books Settlement is getting very hot and heavy, with strong words from both supporters and opponents of the current settlement. As you may know, the Cornell University Library submitted a letter to the court in support of the settlement, although with a request for court oversight of some of the terms. [...]

The week before last I both attended and gave a talk at the Institute for Computer Policy and Law. There was an interesting thread on how IT is disrupting universities, and university libraries, that ran through a number of the presentations. For this post, I’m going to draw on material from three of those presentations: [...]

This morning, I was forwarded a query from a Cornell undergraduate, noting the impending announcement tomorrow of a new, larger screen Amazon Kindle and linking to a Wall Street Journal story on its potential use as an electronic textbook. He suggested that Cornell should consider signing up as one of the universities making this device [...]

The use of mobile devices for research, learning, teaching and creative expression is growing very rapidly. The most recent Horizon report from Educause and the New Media Consortium identifies Mobiles as a key educational technology trend with a time-to-adoption of one year or less. We’re exploring this issue for the Library and figuring out where [...]

Along with many others, I have to point to Clay Shirky’s great post “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”. Here are some key quotes:
When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told [...]

There has been a great deal of recent discussion about the role of orphan works in the Google Book Settlement. In particular, it was a major element of the symposium on “The Google Books Settlement: What Will It Mean for the Long Term?” at Columbia Law School last Friday. There have been a number of [...]

I just read some interesting posts on the challenge of data curation for research libraries. Dorothea Salo of Caveat Lector has two related posts on the relationship between the past push to build institutional repositories and the current push for data curation (Violently in Agreement and A couple other things). She is very worried that [...]

There is a lot of very interesting recent activity in the eBooks arena, and it’s been generating a lot of comment in the new and old media. Here are four recent events that I found particularly noteworthy:
Google Book Search Mobile
Google has released a mobile version of Google Books, with over 1.5 million public domain volumes [...]