Off The Shelf

One of my favorite places to get the “scoop” on a new technology is EDUCAUSE. What is EDUCAUSE? EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s (ELI’s) 7 Things You Should Know About… series provides concise information on emerging [...]

You may have used the ebook database, ebrary, through our library before. Now, ebrary has released two publicly available databases that will have special interest for learners in the School of Public Service Leadership. The first, the Natural Disaster and Extreme Weather Searchable Information Center, includes “hundreds of important government documents related to natural disasters [...]

If you’ve ever asked a librarian about research on the internet, you’ve probably heard that you should be careful about the information you find. Most internet sites lack editors and fact checkers (that’s YOUR job), so there are many factual errors and inconsistencies that can creep in. That’s compounded by the fact that many websites [...]

Academia.edu is a little bit Facebook and a little bit Twitter, but completely focused on helping connect you with people who are conducting research in your field and keeping up with the current research trends. When you sign up for a free account it also gives you your own academic web page. Here’s the example [...]

Imagine you are in a library. As you walk through the library the books all disappear, only to return three hours later, as if nothing happened. Or, you find an item on the shelf. You pull it down, open the book, and instead of the text you find the following: 404 Error Page Not Found. [...]

The good, the bad, and the ugly of open internet research often show up here on Off The Shelf. No matter how often the librarians tout the library databases, we get plenty of learners who can’t get enough of internet search engines. And what about those internet search engines? They seem so benign, so useful. [...]

Wikipedia has recently announced that they will be using expert editors on entries for living people. The general public will no longer be able to change an entry and see it posted immediately. From now on, an expert editor will have to approve the changes before they go live. This is designed to avoid some [...]

Did you know that 14% of Capella learners are part of the military? Whether active duty, veterans, reservists, or Department of Defense/Uniformed Services personnel, the military makes up a large percentage of the learners we serve. Maybe you’re one of them. Maybe you’re a family member or friend. Maybe you’re simply interested in researching about [...]

If you’re reading this, you’ve figured out how to get to a blog. But how much to you know about “microblogging?” Or the biggest name in microblogging today: Twitter? Twitter lets you quickly send out a short message of 140 characters, called a tweet. Then anyone who is signed up to receive your tweets gets [...]

Scholarly, peer reviewed, juried, refereed..… When referring to a professional journal or article, all these terms mean the same thing – the article content has been rigorously reviewed and evaluated by a committee of subject experts and given the seal of approval for academic publishing. Now let’s imagine if we take that peer review process [...]