Registration is now open for the 36th IATUL conference in Hannover, Germany from 5 - 9 July 2015.
The theme of the conference is "Strategic Partnerships for Access and Discovery"
Travel Grants are available for first-time attendees -see the website for further details.
more than 25.000 early English texts from 1473-1700 have been released online to members of the public as part of a collaborative initiative led by the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries and the University of Michigan Library. From Shakespeare and Milton to little-known books about witchcraft, cookery and sword fighting, this rich data set comprises fully-searchable text files that can be read online or downloaded in a variety of formats.
This corpus off electronic texts has been created and released by the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO TCP), an international collaboration among universities, funders and ProQuest, an information company central to global research. Previously, the texts were only available to users at academic libraries involved in the partnership but the data was released into the public domain in 1 January 2015.
Go to source: http://www.rluk.ac.uk/news/thousands-of-early-english-books-released-online-to-public-by-bodleian-libraries-and-partners/
Design thinking focuses on users and their needs, encourages brainstorming and prototyping and rewards out-of-the-box thinking and takes "wild ideas" and transforms them into real-world solutions.
Albert Einstein famously said, "No problem can be solved by the same kind of thinking that created it." So, assuming we agree, what exactly are our alternatives? how can we go beyond our standard approach to problems in higher education and entertain new possibilities? One promising alternative is to engage in design thinking.
Design thinking offers a creative yet structured approach for addressing large-scale challenges. In September 2014, we conducted an EDUCAUSE webinar, Design Thinking: Education Edition and offered examples from out Breakthrough Models Incubator (BMI).
Here we offer a summary of that webinar, discussing design thinking principles and process, describing real-world examples of design thinking in action and offering possibilities for how you might introduce the approach into your own organisation.
Go to source: http://www.educause.edu/ero/...
Read moreChange continues to characterise the EDUCAUSE Top 10 IT Issues in 2015. The pace of change seems not to be slowing but, rather, increasing and is happening on many fronts. There is reason to believe that higher education information technology has reached an inflection point - the point at which the trends that have dominated thought leadership and have motivated early adopters are now cascading into the mainstream. This inflection point is the biggest of the three themes of change characterising the 2015 EDUCAUSE Top 10 IT Issues. A second dimension of change is the shifting focus of IT leaders and professionals from technical problems to business problems, along with ensuing interdependence between the IT organisation and business units. Underlying all this strategic change, the day-to-day work of the IT organisation goes on. but change dominates even the day-to-day, where challenges are in some ways more complex than ever. this "new normal" is the third theme of change.
Go to source: https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM1511.pdf
This report documents the Strategic Thinking and Design work in which the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) engaged from the fall of 2013 through the spring of 2014. Fueled by the deep desire of the ARL membership to rise up to the challenges facing higher education in the 21st century, and grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Association engaged in an unprecedented project to reimagine the future of the research library and reshape its organization to help bring that future into being.
This process was unprecedented in two ways: it neither listed the challenges that research libraries face and then tried to meliorate them one by one nor did it seek a silver-bullet technological solution to move the community forward. Instead, the process—which engaged more...
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