Open Access (OA) and Institutional Repositories (IR)

Open access and Institutional Repositories was the words of the day.  Open access was not so new to me but the Institutional Repositories was a brand new word for me.

Open Access (OA)

Open Access is the free, immediate, permanent, full text online access to research and scholarly material for any user over the entire world at any time.  Two ways of publishing Open Access material exist today.  The green road and the gold road. It all depends on how the information is made available to be used in open access.  An Open Access rainbow also helps to organize the various articles - take a look at this URL for a detailed layout of how the Open Access rainbow works. There are several benefits of Open access but also several challenges.  

Institutional Repositories (IR)

Institutional Repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and spreading the intellectual output of an institution in a virtual form.  Institutional Repositories includes articles, lectures, conference papers, digitized special collections, technical reports, data sets and many more.  Images, Audio files and Audio-visual material is also included in Institutional Repositories.  IR can be used to store learning material, manage knowledge, assess research, house digitized collections etc. Several impacts of Institutional Repositories have been recorded and legal issues are also addressed regularly due to the copyright on research material.

It is so interesting learning these new words and all the online functions that I never knew existed. Don't know if I will ever use all of them but some I will definitely try out.

Uploading movies from YouTube

We have to try and upload a movie, so here is my movie.  It is not on podcasting or blogging but on something that I think is very important as well.  This movie is about building and stocking a school library in an underprivileged area in South Africa.

RSS, Podcasts and Tiny URL's

I am definitely not a podcaster! I heard about it for the first time today and as usual my mind started reading stories for little children on podcasts.  Only one problem: I don't have an MP3 recorder. It sounds interesting though and I will really try to go and listen to some on the Internet.

The RSS things was also interesting, getting the updates for various sites in one area will be great! Especially when our blogs for class is updated or the weather or news updates are uploaded.  For a list of RSS readers you can go to http://blogspace.com/rss/readers.

The Tiny URL's I will never forget.  It is not a word like blogger or wiki or podcasting.  It is so cute!  Well I tried it and I hope it works.  The long URL was http://email.about.com/od/rssreaderswin/tp/top_rss_windows.htm and now the Tiny URL is http://tinyurl.com/yo3on6! !

QR Code

Okay so I finally formed a QR code... Unfortunately I can't scan it because my phone is not clever enough.  See if you can scan it and find out where it leads...  

Research essay and Blogging

At last I finalized my research essay.  I started out slowly but when I finally grasped the idea I just could not stop reading about my topic.  Even though I think I laid it out in a good way I do hope I am on the right path.  The last time I wrote a research essay was about four years ago.

I never thought I would be able to do this blogging, now we learn about twitter and micro-blogging but I think I will take it one step at a time.  Twitter will just have to wait for me.  I will however try out this QR code's.