I missed you last week and there’s been plenty happening on the site to catch up on.  If you’re a fan of our own Pictures at CUNY then you might be happy to learn that the City of New York has just opened up a huge archive of photos spanning the history of the city.  I’ll warn you ahead of time – the site’s been hit hard with traffic so it’s a little difficult to get in right now.  You’ll definitely want to bookmark and try again though, it’s worth the wait.

I noticed there was a ton of activity in the Open Access group!  There was some news earlier in the week that Harvard University had crunched the numbers on their journal access expenses and found them untenable.  Harvard is directing its faculty publishing towards Open Access venues to help combat the exorbitant fees.  If the wealthiest university in the country is sinking under the weight you know things have gotten bad.  Get involved! The CUNY Open Access has regular meetings for anyone interested in helping.

In related news the University of Minnesota announced that it would be putting together a resource for faculty and students alike to help locate and utilize affordable online textbooks.  UM is encouraging faculty from all over the country to contribute so take a look and see if you can help.  Jonathan Cain blogged on the Commons this week that the World Bank had created a new online tool that would allow researchers unprecedented online access to their archives.  It’s hard not to get excited about the potential to be found in the combination of online communities such as ours and all of these amazing resources slowly being developed online.

Tony Picciano grabbed an article out of the Chronicle of Higher Education about the American Association of Community Colleges blunt assessment of the nation wide effort to revamp the focus of community colleges.  President Obama has touted community colleges as absolutely vital to the regeneration of the American economy and it will be interesting to see, pending the results of November, what kind of changes we will see in response to the AACC’s report.

Finally this week, if you hadn’t noticed, the Commons got it’s own bike group!  Their first post is a handy crash kit just in case things go south out there on the mean New York streets.  Be sure and check them out and join up if you pedal to work.

Till next week.