Thursday, June 03, 2004

University of Florida Upgrades for Exponential E-Learning Growth - Converge. E-learning usage at the University of Florida has doubled every year since 2000, with more than 75,000 student seats in 1,300 courses in place today. As a top-tier research and land-grant institution, the university is required to aggressively conduct [Online Learning Update] 8:55:41 AM      Google It!.

More on Google and CrossRef Search. Péter Jascó reviews the CrossRef Search Pilot in his column, Péter's Digital Reference Shelf, Thomson Gale, June 2004. Excerpt: "Make no mistake, I like Google....I appreciate how smart and nibble it is with 3.5 billion Web pages of mostly unstructured text with no metadata, no tagged and marked fields to identify author, publication date, subject and the likes. But I am not impressed by its...modest ability in handling a collection of about 2.5 million scholarly articles that are endowed with consistently used rich metadata. These articles were presented to Google (whose spider could not crawl these pages) on a silver platter by nine well-known publishers for the CrossRef Search Pilot project." (Thanks to Gary Price.) [Open Access News] 8:47:47 AM      Google It!.

Tyan aims four-way Opteron board at supercomp makers. Computex Boasts Chinese 640-node cluster win By Tony Smith . [The Register] 12:18:08 AM      Google It!.

PalmSource in License Talks with China's Bird, TCL. SHANGHAI (Reuters) - PalmSource Inc said on Wednesday it is talking with Chinese mobile phone maker Ningbo Bird <600130.SS> and an arm of TCL about licensing its Palm operating software for handheld devices. [Reuters: Technology] 12:12:19 AM      Google It!.

Fiber To The Dorm Room [Slashdot] 12:10:24 AM      Google It!.

Scientists discover way to regulate the body's energy expenditure [Science Blog] 12:08:35 AM      Google It!.

Institutional repositories from a library perspective. H. Frank Cervone, The Repository Adventure, Library Journal, June 1, 2004. Excerpt: "The digital repository genesis has been short, beginning in late 2000 when the UK's University of Southampton released a software package called EPrints. Since then, the movement to establish digital repositories has gained momentum....Implementing an institutional repository raises complex questions about organizational resources and strategies, as well as questions about roles and responsibilities. After all, many institutional repository projects are motivated by the desire to change the current model of scholarly communication. This change, if successful, would place the responsibility for publishing material on scholarly institutions, taking the commercial publishers largely out of the picture." (PS: One quick correction. Repositories do not perform peer review, and those who want to use them to change the current model of scholarly communication do not want to bypass or abolish peer review. The goal of those supporting repositories is to complement peer-review providers, like journals, not to replace them.) [Open Access News] 12:03:40 AM      Google It!.

Scientists Find New Type of Gene in Junk DNA. LONDON (Reuters) - Junk DNA may not be so useless after all. [Reuters: Science] 12:00:11 AM      Google It!.