IVSL registration arrived

My username and password arrived for the Iraq Virtual Science Library! I can now take the system for a test drive and figure out how to design a seminar on the IVSL for the graduate students at the University of Duhok.

Date I applied: 6 May 2009
Date I received my login: 13 October 2009

Time required to approve my request: 166 days, or five months and a week

Number of days after I left Iraq that the request was approved: 151

Barriers to adoption of new technology….

Manual now available at Scribd

This morning I read a story about Scribd’s effort to publish textbooks online, and it started me thinking. Why not use Scribd to publish my Iraq academic Internet resource manual?

Uploading was a snap. They provided a handy embed code fragment for WordPress.com blogs, so I gave it a shot (below). Snazzy! I hope you like Flash.

Kurdish language Wikihow

Here’s a resource for the University of Duhok. Wikihow is a website where people can post how-to manuals. It has a Kurdish language page.

Rather than have my manual translated into Kurdish, I hope that some people at University of Duhok will be able to post short articles describing individual resources on Wikihow. For example, here are some tasks that might require a bit of learning:

1. how to register for IVSL access
2. how to access JSTOR through IVSL
3. how to find a course syllabus at MIT Open Courseware
4. how to run a quick query at the World Bank WDI site
5. how to use Google Scholar
6. how to write footnotes/bibliographies with Zotero or Endnote
7. how to install R on your computer

I’m sure you can think of more.

I can’t write these in Kurdish, but I bet the students at UOD can.

Iraqi Virtual Science Library needs a marketing director

The Iraqi Virtual Science Library boasts an impressive list of partners and resources. American universities created IVSL in response to Iraq’s forcible isolation from the world of research and scholarship under Saddam.

Scholars here are thirsty for new knowledge. They know they need access to journals and current datasets to practice modern science. The trouble is, they don’t know what resources they have available.

Both the faculty and the students here, independently, have asked me to use my credit card to help them pay for World Bank datasets. [For clarity: their money, using my credit card as a payment system.] They know what journals and data they are looking for, and they want to get into the game.