From the Stanford Report:

The Stanford scholar who wrote a controversial biography of James Joyce’s daughter has settled her claims for attorneys’ fees against the Joyce Estate for $240,000. The settlement successfully ends a tangled saga that has continued for two decades.

In this video, Shloss describes the settlement as both a “vindication of my scholarship”, and a “winning combination” of patient, traditional scholarship; creative lawyering; and cutting edge technology:

The Supplemental material to Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake site really does represent an innovative and effective way of presenting supporting evidence.

If I understand the history of the case correctly, the creation of the supplemental materials site was first made necessary when the Joyce estate forced her publisher to eliminate significant amounts of supporting materials from her book. Not surprisingly, some reviews of the book criticized the work as speculative and lacking in supporting evidence. Shloss responded by publishing the supplemental materials online, for U.S. access only, claiming Fair Use. The Joyce Estate responded with threatening letters, and Shloss responded with help from the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Shloss and Fair Use prevailed, both in the sense of giving scholars a victory and some clout in asserting Fair Use, and in the sense of motivating the creation of a very cool online site of supplemental materials.

Every year, Beloit College produces the Beloit College Mindset List: “a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college.”

This year’s list is full of goodies of all sorts (3. The Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables.) but I am particularly interested in the number of items on the list that speak to incoming students’ relationships to information and education:

4. They have never used a card catalog to find a book.
14. Text has always been hyper.
20. American students have always lived anxiously with high-stakes educational testing.
34. They have always been able to read books on an electronic screen.
35. Women have always outnumbered men in college.
36. We have always watched wars, coups, and police arrests unfold on television in real time.
48. Elite American colleges have never been able to fix the price of tuition.
50. Everyone has always known what the evening news was before the Evening News came on.
72. Migration of once independent media like radio, TV, videos and compact discs to the computer has never amazed them.

Friday’s quote of the day:

The pressures of rising publication, together with the dazzling potentialities of the electronic computer, are forcing librarians to think more quantitatively about their libraries than most of them ever have before and, simultaneously, have aroused the interest of the computer expert and the systems analyst in information storage and retrieval systems, of which the library is still the most successful exemplar.

From: Morse, P. McCord. (1968). Library effectiveness: a systems approach. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press.

Forty years later, and we’re still trying to figure out how to adapt to the same pressures and potentialities.

From the Chronicle Wired Campus Blog, U. of Virginia Plans to Phase Out Public Computer Labs. While 99% of students bring laptops to UVA, the labs have still been heavily used. UVA decision-makers apparently consider the computer labs to be a convenient service, not an essential one, based on this:

internal data indicated that 95 percent of the time those students used the lab computers to surf the Web and read and compose text documents—tasks that officials say they could easily do on their own computers.

This strikes me as a rather cavalier decision (pardon the pun). We have a very similar situation here at Stanford — near ubiquitous laptop ownership, coupled with heavy computer cluster usage. From talking to students, we have learned that they leave their laptops home when they head off to classes in the morning. Stanford is a big campus, most kids bike to classes, and they don’t want to lug their laptops around all day. Consequently, our computer labs get heavy use during the day. Students tell me that they bring their laptops with them when they come back to the library to study after dinner. I hope we will continue to support computer labs and laptop use. Perhaps we can look at cheaper thin-client computers in the library (especially if students really are using them primarily for email, web, word processing); but it seems clear to me that computer clusters are still meeting a need for most students.