Subject line: The Technology Source Archives Are Under Construction
I am delighted to announce that The Technology Source (TS) archives will be available to the Internet community courtesy of the UNC School of Public Health Executive Master's Programs in Health Policy and Administration, which has funded the reprogramming of TS content on UNC's ibiblio server. As you may know, ibiblio is billed as "the public's library and digital archive," and is one of the largest conservatories of freely available information on the Internet (see the "About" page at http://www.ibiblio.org/about.html ). What you may not know is that UNC's School of Public Health Executive Master's Programs in Health Policy and Administration is one of the first programs in the country to offer distance education degrees in health administration and, therefore, has supported online education and using information technology tools to enhance the educational process for years.
As Jim Porto, the program's director, told me when authorizing funding for this project, "The Technology Source has been a valuable source of information on topics relevant to our delivery of distance education courses. We hated to see the rich archive of articles no longer available to researchers and practitioners. As strong advocates of maintaining open access to knowledge stores, we felt it important that we take action to preserve the archive. We are confident that our modest investment will yield rewards for a long time to come."
It is clear that electronic journals represent a large part of the future of academic journals because these publications enhance the professional communication process using the same tools that we urge educators to take advantage of in schools, but it is also obvious that e-journals are fragile and can quickly disappear into cyberspace. A movement is growing, however, whereby colleges and universities are becoming publishers of open-source academic e-journals, which, hopefully, will allow them to have more stability. We are certainly grateful to Paul Jones, who directs ibiblio, and to Jim Porto and his colleagues in public health for their foresight (and funds!) in ensuring that TS remains available to the community.
We have a draft template of the archives posted on ibiblio at www.technologysource.org and hope to have the reprogrammed ejournal, complete with search engine and "read related" features, available mid-summer at this address.
I was deeply touched by the 400 plus letters I received in response to my announcement that the Michigan Virtual University (MVU) was no longer able to host the TS archives. I was unable to respond to every letter, but please know that all were appreciated. Also know that MVU has posted a pointer from the www.ts.mivu.org address to the ibiblio site, so the some 13,000 or so web sites that had links to TS are no longer broken links.
Best.
Jim
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James L. Morrison
Editor-in-Chief, Innovate
http://www.innovateonline.info
Professor Emeritus of Educational Leadership
UNC-Chapel Hill
http://horizon.unc.edu
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