Library Lowdown

From Journal of International Commerce and Economics: Policy Challenges of Cross-Border Cloud Computing
by Renee Berry and Matthew Reisman
"...the shared nature of cloud services may provide a way for a business to access applications or computing power that would otherwise be unaffordable...The potential benefits of cloud computing need to be weighed taking into account the organization’s needs in terms of privacy, security, regulatory compliance, existing hardware/infrastructure, and many other factors."

From Search Engine Watch: When to Post on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr for Maximum Effect"The best time to post content with a link on Twitter is 1 to 3 p.m. EST Monday to Thursday. Over on Facebook, between 1 and 4 p.m. mid-week is the sweet spot..."

From The Guardian: Battle for the InternetA series on the future of the Internet.  Highlights include:

• Big Data age puts privacy in question as information becomes currency
• Me and my data: how much do the internet giants really know?
• The online copyright war

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Distance-Learning Survey Shows Growing Concern for Student Services"...student services, like library services, student orientation, tutoring, and counseling are needed to provide a well-rounded education.”

From The World Bank: Measuring Financial Inclusion by Asli Demirguc-Kunt & Leora Klapper"... presents the first round of the Global Findex database, a new set of
indicators that measure how adults in 148 economies save, borrow, make payments,
and manage risk."

From Statistics Canada: Survey of Household Spending, 2010
"Provincially, the highest average spending on goods and services was by households in Alberta ($61,134), followed by households in British Columbia ($56,812)."

From The Note on my Door: Counterintuitive digital media assignments"students are asked to turn their digital expertise and expectations upside-down: to use online search tools specifically for the purpose of figuring out what's not available to them with the click of a mouse... most students turned to human assistance for this assignment, or what one student referred to as the old fashioned technique, or search engine, if you will, of asking a librarian."

EDUCAUSE Review Magazine, Volume 47, Number 2, March/April 2012
Contents include:

• Connecting Two Worlds: Collaboration between Higher Education and Corporate Learning
• Harnessing the Power of Information Technology: Open Business Models in Higher Education

New from Statistics Canada: Study: Snow cover trends in Canada, 1972 to 2010 
Highlights:

• mean annual area of snow cover in Canada has declined by 5.1% from 1972 to 2010
• lowest average snow cover occurred in 1998

From Online (March/April 2012): Advanced Search in Retreat, by Greg R. Notess"Google has been making many interface changes over the past few months, and advanced search has been bounced around to various locations. For years, the advanced search link had been near the main search box. With design changes in 2011, the direct link to the advanced search was moved to be a drop-down choice when clicking the gear icon for options in the upper right-hand corner. Many of Google’s databases have separate advanced searches. Not all are linked in the same way."

From Statistics Canada's Health Reports: Geozones: An area-based method for analysis of health outcomes"Geozones is based on population proportions and the comparison of different populations within specified areas, the results of which are used to create a typology of population concentration for a given level of geographic aggregation."

From Public Policy Forum: Towards a More Innovative Future: Insights from Canada's Natural Resources Sector
"In all of our roundtable discussions, participants stressed the need for greater collaboration across industries and regions. This was seen as a key first step in generating ideas and strategies to fuel innovation across the whole of the sector and build the capacity it requires. Effective collaboration on a wide range of non-competitive areas offers significant opportunities to address challenges all industries face..."

From EDUCAUSE Quarterly: The Blended Learning Toolkit: Improving Student Performance and Retention, by Thomas B. Cavanagh"... the Blended Learning Toolkit, a comprehensive resource for individuals and institutions to draw upon to develop and deploy blended learning initiatives."

From the Pew Internet & American Life Project: Social networking sites and politics "Some 38% of SNS users have discovered through a friend’s posts that his/her political beliefs were different than the user thought they were."

Simply Map is a great addition to the RRU Library online collection! With Simply Map users can create professional quality thematic maps using various data sources such as NAICS codes or demographic information.  Simply Map can be accessed via the Article Databases tab on our webpage.

The Oxford University Press Journals technical issues have been resolved.

The Sage Research Methods Online database technical issue has been resolved.

We are experiencing technical platform problems with the Sage Research Methods Online and Oxford University Press Journals databases.  Hopefully they will be resolved soon!

From The World Resources Institute: The Corporate Ecosystem Services Review: Guidelines for Identifying Business Risks & Opportunities Arising from Ecosystem Change
"Ecosystem degradation is highly relevant to business because companies not only impact ecosystems and the services they provide but also depend on them. Ecosystem degradation, therefore, can pose a number of risks to corporate performance as well as create new business opportunities."

From Statistics Canada: 2011 Census - Population and dwelling counts
Highlights: 

• Canada's population grew by 5.9% between 2006 and 2011
• Alberta's population growth rate is the highest among the provinces at 10.8%
• 7 Canadians in 10 are living in one of Canada's 33 census metropolitan areas