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Textbooks: A Value Proposition
11/13/2007
Libraries can provide copies on short-term loan for all students unwilling or unable to purchase a textbook. The proposed Ohio Senate legislation would mandate all state institutions of higher education to make available at least two copies of all required textbooks and other learning materials in the appropriate campus libraries. Many libraries would be hard-pressed to meet this requirement without significant increases in funding. One mid-sized community college in Ohio calculated that it would cost $131,730 to purchase two copies of all required texts for the Fall 2007 quarter. The materials budget for this same library is $280,000 per year; 47 percent of the materials budget would be used to pay for the books for one academic quarter.
Such a solution has severe limits in practice as well. The popularity of the textbooks would likely result in the books being placed on “closed reserve” and not permitted to leave the library. This would limit students’ study opportunities and make “open book” in-class tests impossible. Librarians also observe that students do not sit and read print materials on reserve—they photocopy them. Such a system blatantly encourages copyright infringement.
Students need to build a professional bookcase. This is contested territory. Andrew Spielman, associate dean for academic affairs in the College of Dentistry at New York University, sees building a personal library as useful for graduates of the NYU Dentistry program. The school, which graduates approximately 8 percent of all newly minted dentists, has worked with VitalSource to create an off-line digital text as a primary resource available to NYU dental students. The students access a searchable set of learning materials aggregated from content taken from a variety of publishers. The DVD on which the materials are distributed can be moved among computers, individual notes can be shared among class members, and the students retain access to the materials after graduation.
On the other hand, outside of Gray’s Anatomy, how many print books actually endure as a trusted source of discipline-based knowledge? Name the countries and draw their boundaries on a map of the African continent. Recommend a treatment for depression. Decide where to dangle that participle. To accomplish any of these tasks, students are ill-advised to reach to a bookshelf for their college text. By the way, even Gray’s Anatomy has gone digital with CD-ROMs, websites and author discussion boards updating the print text. A subscription model, more than an ownership model, might provide more benefits to future dentists, as well as their future patients.
Spielman has been tracking student and faculty response to the Vital Book for the past several years. Once experienced with the digital bookshelf, the majority of students see the benefits of digital, though a notable minority still prefers print. Frank Daniels, VitalSource’s CEO, reports that in VitalSource’s experience 18 percent of students prefer digital to print when the content is equivalently priced
Tufts University has optioned rights to a technology that can recharge the batteries of any hybrid electric and electric-powered vehicle while it is driven. The Tufts-developed technology could increase by 20 percent to 70 percent the miles per gallon or total driving range performance of vehicles like the Honda Civic, Ford Escape, and Toyota Prius hybrids and the Tesla Motors and Phoenix Motorcars electric vehicles. The University of Florida has entered into a research agreement with life sciences company Cyntellect. The university's Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research will work with the company to focus on a variety of research areas including the purification and analysis of cancer stem cells (CSCs), rare cells believed to be directly involved in propagating cancers. George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, VA has been awarded a grant from Intergraph to enable students enrolled in GMU's Geospatial Intelligence Graduate Certificate program to use the company's geospatial production and exploitation software as part of their core curriculum. The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) has launched a new Internet security incubator. The incubator was developed to commercialize promising technologies that address major cyber security and privacy issues. The first companies to enter the incubator are Denim Labs and SafeMashups. ISO/IEC has published the Office Open XML (OOXML) file format standard, formally known as ISO/IEC 29500:2008. It describes file formats originally designed by Microsoft for its Office 2007 productivity suite, which are used in presentation, spreadsheet and word processing applications. Microsoft exec Kirill Tatarinov Wednesday described some new features to expect in the forthcoming Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 enterprise resource planning solution. He gave the keynote address at Microsoft's Convergence 2008 event in Copenhagen, Denmark.
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