Thursday, March 23, 2006

Librarian's Guide to Institutional Repositories I'm passing along this resource that was reported in Peter Suber's Open Access News. Institutional repositories are designed to store the academic products of a university or college (including research, theory, and teaching resources). Some institutional repositories contain materials that will be of use as instructional resources; they constitute another important sub-domain within the universe of instructional repositories. _____JH ______ Intro to IRs for librarians. Margaret J. Pickton and Joanna Barwick, A Librarian's guide to Institutional Repositories, a preprint forthcoming from eLucidate. Abstract: Institutional repositories (IRs) are a recent feature of the UK academic landscape. You may already have one at your workplace (in which case you might be better to skip to the next article); you will probably have heard the term being bandied about by your colleagues; you might even have come across one when trawling the web. But what is an IR? Should your institution have one? And if so, how would you go about creating it? These are some of the questions we hope to address in this short article. By noemail@noemail.org (Peter Suber). [Open Access News] 3:53:53 PM    COMMENT []

2020--Future of Computing This web focus issue of Nature contains interesting articles about the future of computing in science (available for free access in html and pdf files). Additionally, the article provides a wonderful interactive timeline about the major computing advances of the last 50 years. _____ _____ "In the last two decades advances in computing technology, from processing speed to network capacity and the internet, have revolutionized the way scientists work. From sequencing genomes to monitoring the Earth's climate, many recent scientific advances would not have been possible without a parallel increase in computing power - and with revolutionary technologies such as the quantum computer edging towards reality, what will the relationship between computing and science bring us over the next 15 years?  This Nature web focus combines commentaries from leading scientists and news features analysis from journalists assessing how computing science concepts and techniques may transform mainstream science by 2020." 3:24:25 PM    COMMENT []