Open Access Digital Media & Learning Books from MIT Press

Thanks again to Fred Stutzman for his blog post alerting us to the release of a large collection of books on digital media and learning from MIT Press. After a free registration process all chapters of the books are available for download in PDF. The MIT Press site also generates the citation metadata in a [...]

Nature Precedings: going boldly where no publisher has gone before

I have to wholeheartedly agree with Tim O’Reilly’s blog post when discussing Nature Precedings, “Kudos to Timo and his team at Nature. They are consistently the boldest and most innovative of publishers — and it’s so rare to see a market leader with Nature’s unparalleled reputation taking such risks. It’s truly inspiring”. This is a [...]

Books by the Chapter Anyone?

Ebooks have been available online and for download for a while. Now you can save even more money by buying just the chapters of the ebooks you need. For the moment only O’Reilly is doing it, see their blog entry. Checking out their Safari Online site to decide which chapter to buy might soak so [...]

Worldcat from OCLC

Reading The Chronicle: Wired Campus blog today I came across the Worldcat global library catalog service. I was impressed by the quick response. As an experiment I attempted to see whether Bond’s holdings were part of this effort. I searched for a book on Wikis (Wiki: Web Collaboration, Ebersbach et al, Springer 2006) that I knew [...]

Impressions of RefWorks

The first time I logged in to the RefWorks trial I was impressed. The user interface is clean and response times are surprisingly good, such a change from the complexity of EndNote. I like the RefWorks menu system and the layout. The keywords are simple and meaningful. Yes I can happily work with RefWorks. I [...]

Attracted to SafariU

I just read Jon Udell’s blog entry about an interview he podcast with with CJ Rayhill who is the CIO at O’Reilly and Associates. She talks about the newly released full version of SafariU which allows lecturers to combine their own material plus segments of books from Safari Online into a customised printed textbook. This book [...]

E-prints becomes E-publications

Entries in this blog suffered a hiatus due to the pressures before the start of our new semester 062. The first real taste of using Blackboard has resulted in few hiccups, although personal reactions are being gathered and will be reported on here soon.
During this period Bond’s new central institutional repository, e-Publications@Bond, has been deployed [...]

Windows Live Academic Launches

As part of their overall Windows Live initiative Microsoft has just launched a direct competitor to Google Scholar in Windows Live Academic. It is good to see such a comprehensive offering and strong competition so that we users can hope for a better service.
My initial impression is that the search on Live Academic produces somewhat [...]

Blooks - something for aspiring bloggers

Once more I have discovered another new word to do with blogging that has been around for a few months but has passed me by. It was only when reading a BBC News blog entry a couple of days ago, US Cook Wins Blogging Book Prize, that I discovered ‘blooks’. According to Wikipedia definition a ‘blook [...]

A ‘comic’ approach to understanding IP and Copyright

It is clear that simply putting the institutional IP and Copyright policies on the web and expecting all staff and students to read and abide by them is not completely effective. Even the improvement of putting the salient points on one page does not always achive the attention it deserves.
I was thus quite taken with the [...]