EDUCAUSE | Library Items

Emergency Preparedness: Leveraging IT for Safety and Security

September is National Emergency Preparedness Month, an opportunity to raise awareness about the importance of emergency preparedness in homes, workplaces, colleges and universities, and communities. Institutions of higher education across the country are fine-tuning and test-driving their emergency preparedness plans, testing their emergency notification systems, and conducting awareness sessions for students, faculty, and staff. They are also exploring how they can better leverage information and communications technologies to help them address every phase of emergency management: prevention-mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. The University of Maryland is taking a comprehensive approach to protecting its human, physical, and cyber assets and is exploring the use of social networking to enhance communication with stakeholders.

It?s Not Easy Being Green

How environmentally friendly is your college or university? Well, it all depends on whom you ask.

As higher education has become more conscious of issues such as sustainability, a number of independent assessments have arisen from both nonprofit and for-profit sources. For better or for worse, they all have different methods of evaluation and serve disparate audiences ? and many of these assessments rely on self-reporting. As these green ratings have proliferated, many college officials have said they would prefer a national standard. And some experts think a new environmental rating being created may become one.

OCLC's Copyright Evidence Registry makes its debut

The Copyright Evidence Registry [OCLC] was recently launched. The effort promises a big step forward for those struggling to come up with ways to identify works for whom owners cannot be identified or located -- orphan works. The effort also enables those with information about the owner of a work to contribute that as well.

Students Flock to Web Sites Offering Pirated Textbooks

A new survey of students found that about a quarter of them reported hunting for an illegal copy of a textbook from pirate Web sites.

The survey was small?only about 500 students from two colleges?but it is one of several indicators that downloading unauthorized textbooks is becoming commonplace at college campuses.