On e-mail lists and in interviews, university CIO's and other information-technology professionals say their mission is getting derailed and staff time is being overloaded by copyright takedown notices, "prelitigation settlement letters," RIAA-issued subpoenas, lobbying efforts, and panicked students accused of piracy.

Now, feeling burdened and betrayed, some of those universities are quietly fighting back, resisting requests for information and trying to quash subpoenas. Those that do so, though, find that their past compliance — and the continued compliance of their peer institutions — is being held against them.

"We feel like we've been led down the garden path, and our interest in working in partnership and leading our mission as educators is now being used against us," said Tracy Mitrano, director of IT policy at Cornell University.

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In court documents and interviews, the RIAA has argued that past compliance with the subpoenas means that they were not an "undue burden" before, so they should not be one now. Both Morehead State's and Marshall's motions to quash the subpoenas were denied. The judges in both cases said there was no "undue burden" because investigations were not actually necessary to abide by Ferpa regulations. In the Morehead State ruling, the judge pointedly noted that "Morehead has responded, without objection, to virtually identical requests in other, similar litigation."

First, Ryan Gibbons bought a Hyundai so he would not have to drive his gas-guzzling Chevy Blazer to college classes here. When fuel prices kept rising, he cut expenses again, eliminating two campus visits a week by enrolling in an online version of one of his courses.

Like Mr. Gibbons, thousands of students nationwide, including many who were previously reluctant to study online, have suddenly decided to take one or more college classes over the Internet. "Gas prices have pushed people over the edge," said Georglyn Davidson, director of online learning at Bucks County Community College, where Mr. Gibbons studies, and where online enrollments are up 35 percent this summer over last year.

The vast majority of the nation's 15 million college students -- at least 79 percent -- live off campus, and with gas prices above $4 a gallon, many are seeking to cut commuting costs by studying online. Colleges from Massachusetts and Florida to Texas to Oregon have reported significant online enrollment increases for summer sessions, with student numbers in some cases 50 percent or 100 percent higher than last year. Although some four-year institutions with large online programs - like the University of Massachusetts and Villanova - have experienced these increases, the greatest surges have been registered at two-year community colleges, where most students are commuters, many support families and few can absorb large new expenditures for fuel.

At Bristol Community College in Fall River, Mass., for instance, online enrollments were up 114 percent this summer over last, and half the students queried cited gas costs or some other transportation obstacle as a reason for signing up to study over the Internet, said April Bellafiore, an assistant dean there.

"Online classes filled up immediately," Ms. Bellafiore said. "It blew my mind."

At least two universities have picked up Suzette Martinez Standring's "The Art of Column Writing" book for use in their opinion/column-writing courses.

That's according to "The Columnist" newsletter from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, of which Standring is a former president.

The two universities are DePaul in Chicago and the University of Southern Maine.

Fantasy writer Neil Gaiman joins a faculty that includes Kelly Link, James Patrick Kelly and Mary Anne Mohanra for the 2008 Clarion Writers Workshop, the Clarion Foundation announced.

Now in its second year at the University of California, San Diego, the workshop, one of the most highly regarded writing programs in the country, runs for six weeks, from July 29 to Aug. 9. Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman will team-teach the workshop's final two weeks.

Participants are selected from a pool of applicants who demonstrate the potential for successful writing careers. The Clarion Foundation will begin accepting applications on Jan. 2, 2008.

A team of scholars traveled to a medieval library in Venice to create an ultra-precise 3-D copy of the ancient manuscript -- complete with every wrinkle, rip and imperfection -- using a laser scanner mounted on a robot arm. A high-resolution, 3-D copy of the entire 645-page parchment book, plus a searchable transcription, will be made available online under a Creative Commons license.

The Venetus A is the oldest existing copy of Homer's Iliad and the primary source for all modern editions of the poem. It lives in Venice at the ancient Public Library of St. Mark. It is easily damaged. Few people have seen it. The last photographic copy was made in 1901. I was lucky enough to see the manuscript when I went to Venice with my husband, Christopher Blackwell, who is part of a team organized by the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies to photograph and digitize the ancient book.

The idea is "to use our 3-D data to create a 'virtual book' showing the Venetus in its natural form, in a way that few scholars would ever be able to access," says Matt Field, a University of Kentucky researcher who scanned the pages. "It's not often that you see this kind of collaboration between the humanities and the technical fields." Venice is not the most convenient work site. All the gear had to come by boat and be carried or dragged up the stairs of the library. Built in the 1500s, the library has been renovated periodically, but its builders never envisioned a need for big lights, a motorized cradle, 17 computers or wireless internet.

You can't find "Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings" at the Pohick Regional Library anymore. Or "The Education of Henry Adams" at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson's "Final Harvest"? Don't look to the Kingstowne branch. It's not that the books are checked out. They're just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them. Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at least 24 months.

Public libraries have always weeded out old or unpopular books to make way for newer titles. But the region's largest library system is taking turnover to a new level. Like Borders and Barnes & Noble, Fairfax is responding aggressively to market preferences, calculating the system's return on its investment by each foot of space on the library shelves -- and figuring out which products will generate the biggest buzz. So books that people actually want are easy to find, but many books that no one is reading are gone -- even if they are classics. "We're being very ruthless," said Sam Clay, director of the 21-branch system since 1982. "A book is not forever. If you have 40 feet of shelf space taken up by books on tulips and you find that only one is checked out, that's a cost."

That is the new reality for the Fairfax system and the future for other libraries. As books on tape, DVDs, computers and other electronic equipment crowd into branches, there is less room for plain old books. So librarians are making hard decisions and struggling with a new issue: whether the data-driven library of the future should cater to popular tastes or set a cultural standard, even as the demand for the classics wanes. Library officials say they will always stock Shakespeare's plays, "The Great Gatsby" and other venerable titles. And many of the books pulled from one Fairfax library can be found at another branch and delivered to a patron within a week.

But in the effort to stay relevant in an age in which reference materials and novels can be found on the Internet and Oprah's Book Club helps set standards of popularity, libraries are not the cultural repositories they once were. "I think the days of libraries saying, 'We must have that, because it's good for people,' are beyond us," said Leslie Burger, president of the American Library Association and director of Princeton Public Library. "There is a sense in many public libraries that popular materials are what most of our communities desire. Everybody's got a favorite book they're trying to promote."

New Zealand's high school students will be able to use "text-speak" -- the mobile phone text message language beloved of teenagers -- in national exams this year, officials said.

Text-speak, a second language for thousands of teens, uses abbreviated words and phrases such as "txt" for "text", "lol" for "laughing out loud" or "lots of love," and "CU" for "see you."

The move has already divided students and educators who fear it could damage the English language.

New Zealand's Qualifications Authority said Friday that it still strongly discourages students from using anything other than full English, but that credit will be given if the answer "clearly shows the required understanding," even if it contains text-speak.

Critics said the National Certificate of Educational Achievement or NCEA, the main qualification for high school students, would be degraded by the authority allowing text speak use in exams.

Internet blogger Phil Stevens was not amused by the announcement. "nzqa[New Zealand Qualifications Authority]: u mst b joking," Stevens wrote. "or r u smoking sumthg?"

Some parents are writing their college-age kids' resumes. Others are acting as their children's "representatives," hounding college career counselors, showing up at job fairs and sometimes going as far as calling employers to ask why their son or daughter didn't get a job.

It's the next phase in helicopter parenting, a term coined for those who have hovered over their children's lives from kindergarten to college. Now they are inserting themselves into their kids' job search -- and school officials and employers say it's a problem that may be hampering some young people's careers.

"It has now reached epidemic proportions," says Michael Ellis, director of career and life education at Delaware Valley College, a small, private school in Doylestown, Pa.

At the school's annual job fair last year, he says, one father accompanied his daughter, handed out her resume and answered most of the questions the recruiters were asking the young woman. Even more often, he receives calls from parents, only to find out later that their soon-to-be college grad was sitting next to the parent, quietly listening.

"It’s the locations that I know, like the Northern Midwest. I wrote a couple novels out of Nebraska—one called Dalva and one called The Road Home. I currently live in Montana—that’s where Legends of the Fall came from—and now I live down on the Mexican border in the winter, so I go to Mexico a lot. None of this would have happened if I had become a professor, but I didn’t like it. I tried it for a year and a half, and it drove me crazy. I don’t want to teach anybody anything. Everybody’s got to figure it out for themselves. That’s my attitude anyway."

"Just read all that is good and then write. I’m shocked when I go around giving lectures, how little some people have read in these M.F.A. programs. It’s pretty startling. How can you know how to write unless you’ve read the best? That’s my attitude anyway. But it’s partly that our educational system sucks, so there you are. For every good university, there are 100 colleges that aren’t much good at all."