Digital Rights Management and Digital Repositories
This article is a set of PowerPoint slides encoded in PDF format - probably the worst way to present information there is: it's both needlessly bulky and hard to read. Normally I wouldn't even bother linking to such a travesty of presentation but in this case you should at least skim the content. More...

Cosmology on the Internet: Distance Education for the Gifted and Talented
It's the rare paper that will teach me something new about cosmology, but this paper recently listed at LearnScope did. Specifically: "the curvature of our universe could be measured by examining how pi varies as larger and larger circles are drawn within it." Brilliant. More...

The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper
And what do you know? Yesterday, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) released a major white paper that which asserts that institutional repositories are a natural extension of an academic institution's role as a generator of primary research, and envisions such repositories as critical components in the evolving structure of scholarly communication. More...

A Role for SPARC in Freeing the Refereed Literature

Two years ago, Stevan Harnad proposed that, instead of trying to replicate, in a low cost fashion, the existing system of online journals and subscriptions, we should scrap the system and turn to a form of self publishing. More...

Personal Media and the Human Community
Drawing from his own experiences with a project called the Star Festival, linguistics professor Shigeru Miyagawa engages new media from the point of view of rejoining humanism and technology. In mass media, he argues, there is a clear demarcation between producer and consumer. More...

Princeton Says a Few Students Had Access to Yale Web Site

Princeton University says blame the students. Give me a break. More...

Schools May Get to Use Pirated Software

A Malaysian official says schools in that nation may be allowed to continue using pirated software. More...

Ethical Hacker Faces War Driving Charges
It is apparently illegal to test public wireless networks for security flaws, even if you're a security expert. Seems to me there is a big flaw in this legislation, one that encourages people to keep wuiet about security flaws. More...

In a Do-it-Yourself World, Who Needs Librarians?
Good article that examines the role of the librarian in a world where everybody can search for resources online. The upshot of the article is that, since searching for online materials remains difficult to do well, there is a continuing role for librarians. Yes... but. It's still early days. More...

The Processed Book
Nice draft version of an essay posted for comment looking at diferent ways to think of online books. I really like the approach as the author considers the book as portal, the book as self-referencing text, the book as platform, the book as machine component, and the book as network node. More...