One of the many responsibilities teacher-librarians have recently assumed is the development of their school library's web site. Such site provide an organic "window" to the library's programs, services and resources that can be accessed by students, teachers, administrators, parents and community members. As such, they represent another vital…

Traditional approaches to computer-aided learning have tended to minimize the role of the local teacher, despite their experience and close knowledge of their students' learning needs. A new approach to producing educational materials focuses on the construction of "learning objects", storing these in "digital repositories" and…

Librarians need to work with classroom teachers and college faculty to find ways to help students become more intrinsically motivated to learn. They can do this by providing challenging learning experiences that promote feelings of competence and mastery. It is the intrinsically motivated student that becomes a lifelong learner. In this article,…

The University of South Alabama's Baugh Biomedical Library recently initiated a chat reference service targeted at distance education students in the biomedical sciences. After one year of service, the library conducted an evaluation of the chat reference to assess the success of this mode of reference service. Both traditional reference and…

Vision impairment affects approximately 17% of Americans age 45 and older. Yet, 94% of adults with self-reported vision loss did not receive any type of vision rehabilitation services to help them retain independence. These findings underscore the need for promoting awareness about what can be done when vision fails. A national dissemination…

It has just been announced that the 11th European Prison Education Association (EPEA) International Conference will take place in Dublin, Ireland from the 13th to 17th June 2007. Further details and an application form will be available in September 2006. Regular updates will be available at www.epea.org.

An interesting and effective way to showcase the wide variety of fields to which differential equations can be applied is to have students give short oral presentations on a specific application. These talks, which have been presented by 30-40 students per year in our differential equations classes, provide exposure to a diverse array of topics…

The Follett library software system is the literary conscience of St. Francis High School. It reports on overdue books, checkout statistics, and online catalog search records. The circulation numbers tell that reading is a tough sell for today's teens. As the school's custodian of books and information, the author describes his efforts at leading…

This paper examines the postgraduate student body studying by distance learning within the Department of Information Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. The demands of both students and employers have been the chief influences on the evolution of the specialist postgraduate programmes and also the later generalist and further…

Library media specialists in Hawaii, like many of their colleagues elsewhere in the nation, are exploring ways to design and implement a type of student-oriented assessment that focuses on student performance. To tackle the issue of assessment in Hawaii's school library media centers, twenty-four K-12 library media specialists are currently…

There has been a national call for increased use of computers and technology in schools. Currently, however, little is known about how students use and learn from these new technologies. This study examines how students search for, browse, and learn specific information when performing an on-line (Web) versus an off-line (Library) search.…

It is not surprising that the expanding American waistline is correlating to a growing need for health information. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity contributes to an increased risk for hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, and some cancers. And though general medical books that list 100 different…

In this article, the author reports the ripple effects of the energy squeeze due to Hurricane Katrina and other factors that sent energy costs skyrocketing. Energy costs are a good part of why budget growth, which has been steady over the past five years, has been slowing down. The projected change from FY2005 to FY2006 is only 3.3%, compared to…

Christensen defined a disruptive innovation or technology as one that eventually takes over the existing dominant technology in the market, despite the fact that the disruptive technology is both radically different to the leading technology and often initially performs worse than the leading technology according to existing measures of…

Open source has continued to evolve and in the past three years the development of a graphical user interface has made it increasingly accessible and viable for end users without special training. Open source relies to a great extent on the free software movement. In this context, the term free refers not to cost, but to the freedom users have to…