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The University of Michigan Library will now offer on-demand copies of thousands of books no longer under copyright, through an agreement with BookSurge, an “inventory-free” publishing company owned by Amazon.

The library will initially offer 400,000 titles in more than 200 languages, all from the university’s library, for as little as a few dollars on Amazon.com. After an order is placed, BookSurge will print a soft-cover version of the text. BookSurge and the library will split revenue from the sales.

Maria Bonn, director of the library’s scholarly-publishing office, said many books sold in a former, more modest on-demand program were historical texts, agriculture texts, craft handbooks, and cookbooks, along with information about secret societies and masons.

She said an early manual of photography from 1890 had been a recurring hit, and that the library sold 70 copies of The Art of Perfumery, published in 1857, in one quarter. Buyers tend to be a mix of passionate academics or hobbyists, Ms. Bonn said.

Last summer the university began to use the Espresso Book Machine, which converts digital texts into printed copies in about 15 minutes, in the lobby of its undergraduate library. That will continue as a local effort for students and faculty members, Ms. Bonn said. BookSurge will “allows us to make these titles more widely available to more people.” —Erica R. Hendry

The University of Iowa law professor Lea VanderVelde has no problem with her students using Wikipedia. In fact, she hopes others use the information her students have posted in their own research.

Law professors across the country have struggled with how they can use technology in their classes and teaching to their advantage.

Some professors have banned laptops in their classes, saying they can just be a distraction. In California, one group began teaching law courses in virtual reality using Second Life.

When Ms. VanderVelde was preparing to teach a class on employment law last semester, she was trying to think of a new way to teach the complex differences among states’ laws. She decided to divide the states up and give a few to each student to research extensively, and to post their work on a wiki site, using Wikipedia software.

To ensure quality work, Ms. VanderVelde monitored and approved all posts. Students’ grades were based on how much time they had spent on the site working and on the quality of their work. The class created its own search engine in Westlaw to find important law decisions and information that they should include in their work.

“It just struck me that that would be a better way for the information to be organized,” she said. “There is no textbook which does as good of job. I’ve taught every textbook in the market.”

By the end of the semester, her class had created a 1,300 page wiki, the largest of any wiki created for use by the university. “You couldn’t expect students to read a 1,300 page book, but you could encourage them to produce one collectively,” she said. “I have no doubt that it was more work.”

Ms. VanderVelde said that in recent years, many of her students brought laptops to class to take notes, and she knew that many of them were online and perhaps perusing Web sites or playing solitaire.

“There’s a huge debate in the university community on whether we should block Internet in classrooms,” she said. “In this classroom, the laptop had a purpose. I gave the laptop a job.”

But she admits that this model for teaching and presenting research wouldn’t work in all courses. In a property-law class she teaches, she still uses a textbook that she wrote.

Although other lawyers and professors have expressed interest in gaining access to the site, it is only available to Ms. VanderVelde’s students.

“You can imagine why lawyers are interested in accessing this,” she said. “The 25 pages about the state of Minnesota is going to give them better information and more current information than anything else that exists.”

Ms. VanderVelde plans to have her students use the wiki model in the future, adding to what her last class has already created, and recreating some of the information that she thinks they should research and present on their own.

“I have to admit that out of the whole class, I did have one person complain,” she said. “They had dial-up Internet access at home.” —Marc Beja

In an economy where sales of everything are down, an increasing number of authors and publishers, especially in academic fields, are distributing their books free on the Internet. This contradicts common sense. After all, at a time when people are buying fewer books, won’t giving away books compound the problem?

Maybe not.

John Hilton (one of my doctoral students) and I have been researching the question of the impact of “free” on academic-book distribution. Here’s some of what we’ve found:

• The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago has been digitally distributing free copies of its books, but print sales have not declined. “After the complimentary distribution of 21 titles in 2008 that had for many years only been available in print, sales of these titles increased by 7 percent compared with the previous two years,” institute officials reported on their Web site.

• National Academies Press makes its publications freely available online, which has increased people’s ability to find the books, and in turn has increased sales, says Michael Jensen, director of publishing technologies there.

• James Boyle, co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University School of Law, has made several of his books available freely online. “Why might free digital availability make sense for parts of the publishing industry?” he wrote recently. “First, most people hate reading a book on a screen, but like finding out if it is worth buying. I am sure I have lost some sales, but my guess is that I have gained more new readers who otherwise would be unaware of my work, and who treat the digital version as a ‘sampler,’ to which they then introduce others.”

• Yochai Benkler, a professor of entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard Law School, made his book The Wealth of Networks available free. Open publishing “has probably exposed me to people who otherwise would not have gravitated towards an academic book,” he said.

That’s not to say that all authors or publishers would find the same results if they made digital versions of their publications freely available. But the idea that increased access could equal increased sales seems especially plausible for academic works with narrow markets.

And there are other reasons besides sales numbers to offer free book downloads.

Doing so can increase a book’s impact. After Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, published Free Culture free online in 2004, his fans voluntarily translated it into seven languages, produced an audio version, and converted the text into 16 e-book formats. That remixing vastly expanded the book’s reach.

And some authors feel a moral obligation to freely share their work. Hal Abelson, architect of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare movement and a driving force behind MIT’s recent open-access mandate, has also made much of his academic work freely available. When asked what his motivations were for making his work free, he simply said, “It’s the right thing to do.”

Not all authors or publishers will choose the dual path of free online and paid print publishing. But for those who have a sense of moral obligation to disseminate their work as broadly as possible, there is good news. The common-sense notion that providing free digital copies of a work decreases its sales is incorrect in some circumstances. Additional research is needed to understand these circumstances in sufficient, actionable detail. —David Wiley

David Wiley, our July guest blogger, is an associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University and an adviser to Flat World Knowledge, an online textbook company.

This week’s College 2.0 column explores a proposal by a dean at Southern Methodist University who is taking computers out of classrooms in an effort to improve teaching.

The dean, José A. Bowen, wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they’re going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides. (Check out the article for his proposal.)

Are computers being used in a way that is discouraging interaction in classrooms? What is the appropriate use of technology in teaching?

Students have graduated, earned law credit, and held debates on Second Life. Now some universities are using the virtual world to train nurses.

Virtual medical training is nothing new — medical students have used CD-ROM’s and other interactive programs to practice diagnosis for years. And MyCaseSpace, a virtual medical-training program created by a professor at the University of Central Florida, will allow professors to create simulated cases to test students at Central Florida’s College of Medicine this fall.

What makes the Second Life approach different, according to an article in Discover magazine, is its ability to call on real-life participants, giving students access to professors or volunteers who act as patients, as well as a range of medical experts who teach or practice at colleges and universities across the country.

Students can interact with the patients and doctors, order tests, diagnose problems, and recommend treatment, according to the article.

For example, a professor at San Jose State University created a Heart Murmur Sim, which uses real cardiac sounds to train students to listen to a patient’s chest — called a cardiac auscultation exam — and identify heart murmurs, the article said.

Another program is the Nursing Education Simulation, created earlier this year by a nursing instructor in Washington. The program requires students to wear a headset with a display, like pilots use, to “monitor” and “use” defibrillators, IV pumps, and medication to treat a computer-generated patient who is experiencing certain symptoms.

While no studies have emerged about the benefits of using Second Life to train medical students, it offers a richer set of resources, with lower costs, than training in a physical, simulated operating room, said John Lester, an education and health-care market developer at Linden Lab, the company that created Second Life.

“If there’s an expert in Brussels who is a specialist in a procedure that I want to teach my students, I can bring him or her into the virtual space to train them,” Mr. Lester said in the article. “Moving around in the physical world is expensive and the biggest obstacle in medical training.” —Erica R. Hendry

When it comes to basic computer applications, even members of the millennial generation may not know as much as they think they do.

A study by North Carolina Central University found that most students overestimated their skill levels when they were asked how they perceived their ability to complete certain tasks and then tested on those tasks.

Researchers surveyed 171 undergraduates, the majority of whom believed they had either an average or high skill level in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The students were then tested on three different skill levels — basic, moderate, and advanced — in each of those applications.

Students correctly perceived their skill level only in PowerPoint, the study said, with 81 percent of students who thought they had at least an average skill level actually performing that way.

When using Microsoft Word, 75 percent of students perceived a high skill level, and could on average perform 12 out of the 13 basic tasks, like changing the font and making text bold or italic. But these students could perform only five out of the 10 moderately difficult tasks, like performing word counts or justifying paragraphs, and none of the advanced tasks, which included copying and pasting items from the clipboard, according to the study.

The study said students had the worst perception of their skill at using Microsoft Excel. About 69 percent of students thought they had at least an average skill level, but could not perform most of the basic, moderate, or advanced tasks, which included actions that ranged from from copying cells to creating formulas.

Researchers wrote that the “requirements of the business job market and students’ knowledge, experience, and self-efficacy of business computer applications is continually changing,” and recommended more assessment of undergraduates’ computer-skill levels. Otherwise, the study said, students will likely enter the market unprepared. —Erica R. Hendry

Even though it’s the big colleges that typically have the largest budgets and facilities, several universities are teaming up with their local public libraries to bring better service to patrons. At the American Library Association’s annual conference this week, a session titled “Our Town, Common Ground” highlighted some of those partnerships.

According to Library Journal, Cameron University, in Lawton, Okla. calls its local public library “The Little Library That Could.” Faculty members from the university present research at the library, and since both institutions have seen their budgets shrink in recent years, they share grant funds.

And the Journal compares the relationship between Lorain County Community College and Elyria Public Library to that of “the Mouse and the Elephant.” The public library has a branch in the community college’s library, although users need membership cards from both institutions to take out books.

At the conference, though, there was also talk of a partnership that may be close to an end. The Summersville Public Library, in West Virginia, has worked with a local campus of Glenville State College, providing curriculum material and increasing its hours to serve students. Now the college is under new leadership, and a new library board isn’t convinced the partnership is worth it. But discussions about ending the deal have sparked an e-mail campaign by college students. —Marc Beja

When I wrote last week that the American Chemistry Society was taking most of its print journals into digital form to reduce costs, I couldn’t help wondering if the society would pass the savings on to university scientists and libraries. (I also used the phrase “digital-only,” which was wrong. There will still be print; more on that in a moment.)

It turns out they will, after a fashion. The society sent out an announcement today saying that if institutional libraries cancel their print subscriptions and move to Web-based editions by September 30, they will get a rebate — in a year. Specifically, they will get a coupon equal to 30 percent of their 2009 print purchase price, and they can apply that to their 2010 Web edition renewals. So the libraries get a break if they renew their subscriptions for next year.

But if they want to keep both digital and print subscriptions, libraries shouldn’t expect society help. In 2010 it will end a discount it had offered for dual subscriptions.

And for those who like the feel of the printed page, be prepared for shrinkage. The chemistry society will offer print in a condensed format. What used to be one regular page will now hold two pages printed at 70-percent size. Think of switching your computer printer from portrait mode to landscape mode and reducing the size, and you get the idea. The society has more information on this change here. —Josh Fischman

Will Wright, the video-game designer who created The Sims and Sim City, has some suggestions for scholars who make video games about social issues or for use in education. His advice: lighten up.

“Make them a little more playful — maybe a little more abstract,” said Mr. Wright, in a video interview with The Chronicle for the latest installment of Wired Campus TV (featured in the side column of this blog). “I think Dr. Seuss is a good example. He wrote these political books and things … and they came off as very playful, but the underlying themes he was trying to approach were very serious.”

Check out the full interview, including Mr. Wright’s views on the appropriate role of video games in the classroom:

Oh, and I did score one of Mr. Wright’s homemade business cards that he discusses in the interview. The one he gave me is printed on a one-rupee bill from Myanmar. —Jeffrey R. Young

After business hours last Thursday night, an e-mail message popped into the in boxes of 800 people at North Carolina State University with the subject line “Mandatory Security Update: July 2009.” The e-mail message, which claimed to be from the IT Help Desk, said that in an effort to block spam, all e-mail users had to click a link to the university’s e-mail sign-in page and enter their user name and password.

It seemed perfectly normal — the image icons were the same, and links to the home page and directory all looked fine.

But it was all a hoax.

Tim Gurganus, IT security officer for the university, said that “phishers,” or people who send messages to trick people into giving out passwords or other personal information, were to blame. In the past, he said, he had seen phishers trying to get victims to respond via e-mail with their personal information, but he had not come across this method, with a fake sign-in page.

“It was a good copy — no grammatical mistakes, there was the correct university address,” Mr. Gurganus said. “It was a well-executed attack.”

He was able to find out that only one person so far had entered a password, and he sprung into action. For anyone on the campus, the link automatically redirected them to a Web site that told them the page was a fake. Then he reported the site to Firefox and Internet Explorer, so that anyone using antiphishing features would be protected. Firefox blocked it within a few minutes.

He realized that instead of copying the images for their fake site, the phishers had just linked to images on the university’s real site. Mr. Gurganus changed those images so that if someone had still gotten to the fake page, the top banner would read: “THIS IS A PHISHING SITE! Do not enter your password on any site other than webmail.ncsu.edu.”

By 10 p.m., he had done everything he could to prevent anyone else from being fooled, and he was able to track down the five people that had entered their information and had their passwords changed. The phishers didn’t check back until 9 a.m. the next morning, and they didn’t get any information.

“It will probably happen again,” he said. “It’s easy enough for the phishers to commandeer a Web page or two.”

“This came out well for us, but I still think it was a significant, legitimate threat,” he added.

Doug Pearson, technical director of the Research and Education Networking Information Sharing and Analysis Center, said he had heard of a handful of similar attacks.

Mr. Pearson recommended sharing information about attacks with others, using spam filtering, blocking IP addresses used by phishers, and monitoring for high volumes of mail sent from one person, which the university had done. The only other suggestion he had was for user education. “Users need to recognize the tricks of the trade,” he said. —Marc Beja

A number of years ago, my wife and I were driving through a small town in southeastern Ohio when we saw a sign hanging outside a pizza shop that read, “Buy One, Get One.” We commented that if we paid for one, we’d by golly better get one. Such is the humor of academics. But jokes aside, I am increasingly amazed by the ease with which participatory technology allows university faculty members to go two-for-one in the reach and impact of their efforts in teaching.

In 2004 I began asking my students to post their homework on their personal, publicly accessible blogs. (Students who didn’t have a blog before taking a class from me signed up for a blog as one of their first assignments.) By changing their homework assignments from disposable, private conversations between them and me (the way printed or e-mailed assignments work in students’ minds) into public, online statements that became part of a continuing conversation, we realized very real benefits.

The very first semester I began asking students to share their homework this way, a popular e-learning newsletter found and liked one of my students’ essays and pointed its readers to the student’s blog. When the visits and comments from professionals around the world started coming in, students realized that the papers they were writing weren’t just throw-away pieces for class – they were read and discussed by their future peers out in the world. The result was a teacher’s dream — the students’ writing became a little longer, a little more thoughtful, and a little more representative of their actual intellectual abilities. And this benefit came by simply asking students to submit their homework through a different channel. They were already going to write and submit it; I was already going to read it. This was a true two-for-one.

At the same time in 2004, I began posting my syllabus on a publicly available wiki and doing my best to select only readings that were also publicly available and that I could link to from the syllabus. On the one hand, this took some time because I needed to find online articles and materials that my students would be able to get with a single click at no cost. On the other hand, it saved some time because I was able to do all my materials research online.

As I began blogging about my online teaching materials, people from around the world began to see and make use of them in their own courses. Others outside universities started using them to guide their personal study. (These courses eventually ended up in the university’s OpenCourseWare collection.) I was going to create and post the syllabus anyway, and I already had to select readings for students to use. This was another true two-for-one.

In 2007 I began teaching a class that is not offered anywhere else (and still isn’t, as far as I know): “Introduction to Open Education.” I put the syllabus and all the readings online (no extra cost) and planned for all the student writing to be online (no extra cost). As the course was somewhat unique, I extended a broad invitation to people around the world to participate informally in the course — even in online class discussions. The result was a group of approximately 60 people from around the world who read, worked, wrote, and discussed together – and fewer than 10 of them were registered for credit at my university.

The added richness of broader, international perspectives that these outside, informal students brought to the course was priceless for the official students in my class. And there were huge learning benefits for the informal participants as well. (The group of informal students from Italy went on to publish a paper about their experience in the course in a peer-reviewed journal.) I even offered certificates that said, “Congratulations, you completed my course,” to the informal students. These papers did not come from my university or have the university name or logo on them – they were a personal letter from me to them. And yet several people asked for, and obviously valued, them.

For me, for my students, and for the informal students who looked in on or participated in the course outside my university, this “open teaching” was better than a two-for-one. It was a thousand-for-one. When the costs of “open teaching” (freely allowing people outside the university to view course materials and informally participate in the course) are so low, I ask myself a question. Do we professors, who live rather privileged lives relative to the vast majority of the planet’s population, have a moral obligation to make our teaching efforts as broadly impactful as possible, reaching out to bless the lives of as many people as we can? Especially when participatory technologies make it so inexpensive (almost free) for us to do so?

I believe the answer is yes. —David Wiley

David Wiley, our July guest blogger, is an associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University.

It was a week before his graduation from Pennsylvania State University, and John Pereca was getting anxious that he didn’t have any prospective jobs lined up.

That’s when he decided to auction off an interview with himself on eBay. He promoted his auction on Twitter, in an effort to increase Web traffic.

“The career services [at Penn State] were helpful,” Mr. Pereca said, “but they were a lot more helpful for someone looking for a job in Pittsburgh or a job in Philadelphia, but not for someone who’s looking for work in New York City,” closer to his home on Long Island, N.Y.

As a finance major, Mr. Pereca had taken a course in marketing and knew that if he wanted to stand out to a potential employer, he would need to differentiate himself from the crowd. So he took out a $60 ad on eBay, starting at a 99-cent bid for “the right to interview and potentially hire” him.

“Things like this get noticed all the time,” he said. “I thought, ‘Hey, this could work.’”

He posted pictures of himself and of his résumé on the Web site and included a link on his Facebook and Twitter accounts. Realizing that celebrities often have hundreds, if not thousands, of fans checking their Twitter pages, Mr. Pereca started to post on the walls of Oprah Winfrey, Jimmy Fallon, and Shaquille O’Neal, among dozens of others.

“I graduate in 3 days from PENN STATE! My Auction ends on Friday!,” he wrote on several celebrities’ home pages, with a link to the eBay listing. “Help me out!” Kevin Spacey’s account responded, encouraging Mr. Pereca and his unique idea.

He received three job offers: a position as a photographer in Ocean City, Md. (“I wasn’t really looking for that”); a sales job in Atlanta (“I could get a few sales jobs here in New York, and I wasn’t looking to go to Atlanta”); and an offer to be in an adult film (“I appreciate it, but I gotta decline,” he responded).

But on the morning his auction was to end, eBay notified Mr. Pereca via e-mail that his site was removed, since it violated their terms of service.

So far, his job search hasn’t gone well. Two of the interviews he found through Monster.com turned out to be pyramid schemes, and he is still waiting to hear back from some other applications. For now, he is working part time at a local GNC store.

“My biggest issue is that I don’t know specifically what I want to do, and I think that scares people away more than anything,” Mr. Pereca says. “I’m open to a lot of things. I just want to get my foot in the door somewhere, and see what I like and what I don’t like.” —Marc Beja

A just-released series of case studies takes a close look at 12 digital projects to figure out what sustainability strategies have — and haven’t — worked for them. The report, “Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today,” was prepared by Ithaka S&R, the strategy-and-research division of the Ithaka group, a nonprofit outfit that promotes the use of digital technologies in research and teaching. The new study follows up an Ithaka report released in May 2008, “Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources.”

Analyzing the various projects, the report identified a constellation of factors that help a digital resource succeed. It notes that there is no clear formula for success but that “dedicated and entrepreneurial leadership” plays a vital role. So does the ability to make a project’s value clear to users, host institutions, and outside partners. Most of the projects studied rely on hybrid models — for instance, mixing subscription and open-access components, or drawing on institutional support as well as revenue generated by commercial arrangements.

An expanded definition of “sustainability” has emerged. “Sustaining the value of the resource requires more than just ‘keeping the lights on,’” the report says. To stay alive and vital, a digital resource has to evolve along with its users. Its leaders must make its value crystal clear to those who control the purse strings. Project leaders must keep costs low and think creatively about new sources of income. And they cannot take the support of host institutions for granted.

“Whether it’s an advertising model, whether it’s an endowment model, whether it’s a subscription model, you’ve got to figure out how to lower your costs,” Laura Brown, director of Ithaka S&R, told The Chronicle on Tuesday. The trick is “disciplining the way these projects think without knocking them out.”

Nancy L. Maron, one of the report’s co-authors, said that “one of the greatest values of these cases is that the project leaders were not afraid to tell us about the challenges they’ve had.”

In this economy, “they’re all challenged,” Ms. Brown said, which makes it even more urgent that administrators of digital resources understand and explore all the options available to them. “There’s too much value being produced by this not to come to a deeper understanding of how it can persist as a solution” for scholarly communication.

Money for the case studies came from Britain’s Joint Information Systems Committee and from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation. Nine of the 12 resources surveyed are based either in the United States or in Britain; the remaining three are French, German, and Egyptian.

To be included, a project had to have a track record long enough to be useful and leadership willing to be frank about successes and failures. Projects surveyed include humanities and social-science endeavors such as the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, an online library of classical Greek literature at the University of California at Irvine, and Electronic Enlightenment at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The series also features science-based endeavors such as eBird, run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University. —Jennifer Howard

National Harbor, Md. — This week Blackboard got into the iPhone-application business, purchasing a company that designs phone-friendly software for colleges.

At Blackboard’s annual user conference just outside Washington, officials announced they had acquired Terriblyclever Design LLC, which has built iPhone applications for a handful of colleges and high schools. The company, whose product is called MobilEdu, was started by two Stanford University students just last year.

Blackboard paid about $4-million for the company, said Matthew Small, the company’s chief business officer.

That means the founders, Kayvon Beykpour and Aaron Wasserman, who have been friends since they were in kindergarten, are now millionaires and leaders of a new division of Blackboard that will develop services for mobile phones, including the MobilEdu product.

“We could not be more proud and happy,” said Mr. Beykpour, in an interview. “There’s only so much you can do with five of your buddies. We see this as an opportunity to make a change in education.”

What led Blackboard to invest so much in such a young company?

“Every single school is going to have an iPhone application,” said Mr. Small, in an interview. “For Blackboard, the question is, How do we bring teaching and learning to where students are, which is on mobile devices?”

“If you’re going to hire top iPhone development experts,” he added, “they’re going to be students.” —Jeffrey R. Young

David Crane wants to get people all over the world to argue.

This August, Mr. Crane is using his Web site, Debatewise, to sponsor an online debating competition with teams competing from around the globe.

“The idea, really, is to try to make this as international a competition as possible,” Mr. Crane says, “to see if debate can be used as a way of bridging gaps between countries and cultures and to see if we can use — what seems ironic — the method of disagreeing with somebody else as a way of actually finding out how much we’ve got in common.”

His idea has already generated interest. Thirty teams have signed up for the competition from 14 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America. Entry costs $5.

In each round of the competition, teams will be given one day for each of the following tasks: coming up with arguments, preparing for the opposition’s arguments, a second round of debating, and a final day to summarize a team’s points. Two professional judges will rate each match, and the winner will move on.

Neill Harvey-Smith, chair of the World Debating Council, which oversees a world championship including nearly 1,000 students from 50 countries each year, will serve as the competition’s chief adjudicator.

Mr. Crane says he does not debate and has no formal training in debating. “I get very argumentative down the pub,” he says. “But that’s as far as it comes.”

Debatewise, which began last April, is meant to be “the Wikipedia of debates” — helping its users make informed decisions on current affairs, arts, sports, political, and religious issues. Members can post their own debates, add information to others already on the site, or poke holes in other arguments. They are awarded points based on how many times they contribute, not necessarily on the quality of their content.

“What people need,” Mr. Crane says, “is a simple way of being able to compare pro and con arguments to get the information you need to make an informed decision.” —Marc Beja

While many colleges across the country have begun thinking of new ways to prevent students’ pirating of music files, a new study out of England suggests that colleges may have less download activity to police.

Survey results released Monday by the British research companies Music Ally and the Leading Question show that more people are listening to music online legally instead of downloading it illegally.

According to the survey of 1,000 music fans, the ratio of music tracks obtained illegally to those gotten legally has decreased from 4-to-1 in December 2007 to 2-to-1 in January 2009, with many more listeners using Web sites like YouTube and MySpace to listen to “streamed” music.

The age group with the largest drop in downloads was teenagers from 14 to 18 years old. In that same 13-month period, the proportion of teenagers downloading music at least once a month decreased from 42 percent to 26 percent. Nearly two-thirds of teenagers surveyed said they streamed music regularly, with 31 percent listening to streamed music every day.

“These figures challenge the idea that file sharing will just continue to grow,” Music Ally’s chief executive, Paul Brindley, told The Guardian. “While we don’t think for a second that it shows the war against piracy is won, it does at least suggest that there is encouraging news for the music industry.”

Combating illegal music downloads has been a touchy subject in England and the United States in recent years. Last month the Recording Industry Association of America won $1.92-million in fines from a woman who had shared 24 songs online. The RIAA is currently fighting a Boston University graduate student for downloading and sharing copyrighted music. —Marc Beja

A new data-management tool unveiled today by Microsoft Research at its annual Faculty Summit will be available to colleges and universities free.

Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench is designed to help scientists in data-intensive fields such as medical research, astronomy, environmental science, and oceanography make sense of data more quickly in real time, using a better visual interface.

“The way it works right now in many cases is that these research universities are building homegrown workflow systems from the ground up — and that’s such a concern about the sustainability of these systems,” said Roger S. Barga, the principal architect of the project. “Essentially you have people starting from scratch every time.”

With homegrown systems, it is much harder to make even small changes. Each adjustment requires a programmer to open up a writing program and rewrite parts of the code. And “many faculty members can’t do that,” Mr. Barga said.

With Trident, the coding is already written. It collects data and uses a visual interface specific to each project: For an astronomer, that could mean a screen with visualizations of orbiting satellites; for a medical researcher, that could mean floating cells. With a click and a drag, scientists can view data on any aspect of the project, Mr. Barga said.

“When you get a groups of scientists together, they go to the white board and start drawing their science and procedures out,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to simulate with the visualization here.”

Users can also specify which scientists can have access to their work flows, Mr. Barga said, or publish work flows for public viewing, which will make simultaneous analysis from different locations more efficient, he said.

The software is already being used in a select number of university research projects, including the Ocean Observatories Initiative, run by the University of Washington and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

James G. Bellingham, chief technologist at the institute, said scientists plan to use Trident to manage data from a project in the Pacific that will track typhoons as they begin to form, and measure the effects they have both above and below water. He hopes to begin in the summer of 2010.

“Now, everyone will be able to access not just one field program but all of the field programs,” Mr. Bellingham said. “I’m just very excited we have this portal that allows everyone to interact.” —Erica R. Hendry

The American Chemical Society, which publishes several dozen academic journals, is moving to end print editions and produce journals only online. The move was noted by the journal Nature in late June after someone sent it a copy of a memo from a chemical-society official, but unfortunately you can’t read the complete report unless you pay a fee to subscribe or buy one-time access.

And that’s precisely the issue—making money online, and losing it in print—that drove the chemistry society’s decision, according to a recent story in Ars Technica, which you can read in full, at no charge. The Web site notes that the journal publisher said, in the memo, that “printing and distribution costs now exceed revenues from print journals.” Plus, scientists seem happier reading online, the society thinks. So this summer, all but three of its journals will become digital-only. No word on whether the society will pass on to subscribers the savings it realizes from buying less paper and fewer stamps. But don’t hold your breath. —Josh Fischman

An information-technology manager at the University of Georgia who had access to students’ personal information worked in the registrar’s office for nearly a year after he faced felony theft-by-deception charges related to his data-handling position at a different organization.

William Ora Mullen pleaded guilty to those charges and accepted a 10-year prison sentence on April 28 – the same day he gave a letter of resignation to the university. The letter gave May 12 as his final day of employment.

But the university didn’t learn of the charges until May 6, when Mr. Mullen told the university’s office of legal affairs about them, said Tom Jackson, the university’s vice president of public affairs.

Mr. Mullen, who had access to sensitive information like students’ Social Security numbers, was immediately denied access to campus servers on that day. His passwords were also changed. Still, he remained employed by the university until May 12. Mr. Jackson said most of those days were “logged as sick days.”

The charges against Mr. Mullen, who was hired by the university on March 5, 2008, were brought by a former employer, Habersham Metal Products, where he was also an IT manager. He was responsible for purchasing, managing the company’s servers, and strategic planning, according to an article in the university’s student newspaper, the Red and Black.

Mr. Mullen was accused of creating a fake company called Rappaccini-Ga. to quietly obtain company products and payments “by deceitful means,” according to court documents, between August 2005 and March 31, 2008 – including several weeks after he began work at the University of Georgia.

Since Mr. Mullen’s resignation, the university has run two audits of its servers – one by the university’s IT department and one by internal auditing — but neither showed evidence of any foul play, Mr. Jackson said.

“We found nothing to indicate that those files had been transferred, although we can’t say for certain that he doesn’t have them,” Mr. Jackson said. —Erica R. Hendry

The University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Texas at Austin, two longtime participants in Google’s massive book-digitizing project, announced today that they have expanded their agreements with the company. The new deals strengthen the alliance between two big university systems and Google’s Book Search program at a time when it is drawing scrutiny from librarians and federal regulators, among others.

Both universities noted that the new arrangements were made possible by the settlement Google reached last year with authors and publishers who had sued the company for alleged copyright infringement. A federal court is scheduled to hold a fairness hearing on the settlement in October. The Justice Department is investigating whether the agreement violates antitrust regulations.

In a statement, Wisconsin said that the fresh deal “enables the university to broaden public access to its collection in new ways.” That includes the combined library holdings of the university and the Wisconsin Historical Society, described as “one of the largest collections of documents and historical materials in the United States.” According to the release, the university has already digitized all the historical society’s genealogical materials and has begun scanning its Native American collection and its African-American collection.

Texas issued a similar statement emphasizing that the new agreement will make it easier to spread its libraries’ intellectual wealth. It ensures “that our participation in the project will fulfill our initial primary goals of discovery, preservation and access,” said Fred Heath, vice provost and libraries director. “Additional provisions will enhance local access while allowing for the introduction of rich materials from our collections to a broad audience.”

The University of Michigan, one of Google’s staunchest partners in the venture, announced a similar expanded agreement in May. —Jennifer Howard