Citing datasets, a How To guide

Researchers from the Digital Curation Center have posted a How To Guide:
How to Cite Datasets and Link to Publications

Book Citation Index is released

The book citation index has been launched as part of the Web of Knowledge

It covers 25,000 books in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities dating back to 2005.

13.5 million additional cited references will appear inWeb of Knowledge as a result of this launch.  

Coverage is expected to rise to 30,000 books by the end of 2011, with 10,000 new books added each year.

What's in it?

• The Book Citation Index will cover only scholarly books that present fully referenced articles of original research, or reviews of the literature. 
• The Book Citation Index will cover both series and non-series books.
• The Science Edition of the Book Citation Index will include books with copyright from the current or previous five (5) years (e.g. 2010-2005)
• The Social Science & Humanities Edition of the Book Citation Index will include books with copyright from the current or previous seven (7) years.

For a full explanation of the selection process click here.
For the Master Book List and a list of publishers covered click here.

For the press release click here.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

From the Apple website:

Wall Street Journal tribute

Kindle Fire: Amazon's tablet is out!

Amazon announced yesterday the release of the Kindle Fire, its new tablet. It will be available on November 15 at $199.  

Authors sue the HathiTrust

The HathiTrust is an initiative from a variety of academic institutions to 'build a reliable and increasingly comprehensive digital archive of library materials'.

On September 12, the Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois (UNEQ), and eight individual authors filed a law suit against HathiTrust, the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University for copyright infringement. 

This page has the legal documents and various reactions to that lawsuit.

E-textbooks: another project

Indiana University has released a summary of two years of research on their E-Textbook project.

About 60% of the students surveyed said they preferred the e-textbook to a paper textbook, although this ranged from a high of 84% to a low of 36% depending upon the course.

Factors influencing preference for e-textbooks:
Ability for instructor to annotate and share with the class:	69%
Sustainability (reducing paper)	67%
Cost	64%
Weight of Books	61%
Student Annotations	60%

See also Chronicle article on the topic:

The university requires certain students to purchase e-textbooks and negotiates unusually low prices by promising publishers large numbers of sales—now has the participation of major textbook publishers, and university officials plan to expand the effort.

Hacking the Academy

Hacking the Academy, a book crowdsourced in one week

In May 2010 the two authors Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt asked online:

Can an algorithm edit a journal? Can a library exist without books? Can students build and manage their own learning management platforms? Can a conference be held without a program? Can Twitter replace a scholarly society?

They picked the best submissions (over 300 received in one week) and posted the volume online. Click here for more about the methodology. This initiative comes from the University of Michigan Digital Culture project.

Here are some shortcuts to the main chapters:

• Hacking Scholarship
• Hacking Teaching
• Hacking Institutions

From Scroll to Screen

We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all.

Full NYT article

Data Storage - Infographic

Via Rackspace blog

The Case Study and the Tablet

The B-School Case Study Gets a Digital Makeover

'Tablet technology is beginning to transform case studies from straightforward narratives into complex and changeable plots—a metamorphosis nearly a century in the making.'

This BusinessWeek article describes how some B-schools are using digital tablet platforms (iPads, Kindles) to deliver course materials and case studies in particular.