Ubiquitous Research: Integrating library resources into online courses.

Online learning is transforming the way colleges and universities offer credit bearing courses. Now students are able to finish some or all of a degree online, with courses and programs from the hard sciences to the humanities. Nevertheless, a college education is comprised of a variety of educational and social activities that extend beyond a discrete class. Classroom learning is enriched and supported by services across campus, from the writing center to tutoring services, to the library. This article discusses the experience of librarians working in a small, urban community college in integrating library collections, reference services, and information literacy into the course management system, Blackboard. Specifically, the authors discuss 1) approaches to providing and presenting resources and services within the Blackboard environment, and 2) models for librarian/faculty collaboration in an online learning environment

Selection Criteria for Academic Video Game Collections

As higher education begins to take games and gaming seriously, academic libraries will begin to build video game collections to support research and learning on campus. This article discusses their relevance in academia and proposes useful criteria for building video game collections in academic libraries. The authors outline selection considerations for developing video game collections and propose the following criteria for selecting games: physical characteristics, teaching and learning principles present in the games, subject matter and content, and the cultural and historical value of a game

Pulling It All Together: Teaching Genre, Disciplinary and Career Literacies, and the Framework for Information Literacy in an Associate Degree Capstone Course

We team teach a semester-long credit-bearing information literacy course for urban community college students in New York City’s South Bronx. It is a capstone course, designed to support students at the end of their first two years of college as they consider the next stage in their own development, be that transferring to a four-year institution or entering the workforce. For this course, we have constructed an approach to critical reading that combines explicit exploration of academic and disciplinary genres with an investigation into the processes of knowledge production and communication shared by the individuals who produce them. This chapter discusses our approach to the course, describes some example assignments and discussion prompts, and includes what we have learned during the course development phase

Technology Innovations in Publishing: New Directions in Academic and cultural communication.

Over time, publishing technologies have not only influenced how people read, but also how knowledge is evaluated and authority is established. Social and mobile technologies represent relatively recent developments that have transformed the trade publishing world, but the extent to which they have affected academic publishing remains an open question. This article examines the rapid and disruptive transformations in the trade and digital publishing world, discusses how these developments have already intersected with the work of academics and considers how these changes might continue to transform the dissemination of academic research in the future

Flying off the Shelf: e-Books go Mobile

On May 3, 2013, the two Hostos librarians teamed up with two librarians of Lehman College’s Leonard Lief Library at the Bronx EdTech Showcase to address the challenges and joys of e-books. Their hour-long presentation, focused on trends in ebooks, technical issues such as DRM and formats, CUNY’s eBook collections, and the challenges of informing students and faculty about e-books

TRY plant trait database – enhanced coverage and open access

Plant traits - the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants - determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait‐based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits - almost complete coverage for ‘plant growth form’. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait–environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives