Your daily dose of news, notes and links from around Kansas University.

• So after hearing about KU’s new library annex expansion this week, I took the opportunity to make my first ever visit to the annex.

And that timed just right with some new video training we’re doing over this way, so you get to witness the fruits of my video labor. (And labor it was, as some of the folks who saw me last week can attest!) Through all my technological issues, I was quite impressed with the annex’s Indiana Jones-style shelves upon shelves of library materials.

A quick reminder: KU is asking for the regents’ blessing to spend $4 million in private dollars to double the space of the existing library annex, and as you can see, they’ve already got a pretty big space.

I hope you enjoy the video — and, as always, let me know what you think. My mad video skills are still very much in their infancy.

• A couple other quick things I picked up while hanging out at the Library Annex. Only about 2.2 percent of the materials are retrieved each year, but a faculty member can request to have anything pulled out of storage at any time.

It only takes one faculty member to pull an item out of storage.

And it’s more than just books. The collection in the annex also contains a pretty sizable number of old vinyl jazz records, along with a healthy dose of other forms of music as well.

The space in the annex has a capacity of 1.6 million volumes, and about 50,000 new volumes are added to the libraries each year, according to the KU Libraries website.

• In what’s believed to be a first, Oklahoma State University’s school newspaper (which is somewhat oddly named the Daily O’Collegian) is shifting to a partial online paywall, according to the Chronicle for Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog.

I can’t imagine that this will catch on, but it’s an interesting step. The paper will cost $10 per year for people outside a 25-mile radius of the OSU campus. People with .edu e-mail addresses and people who visit the site fewer than three times per month will still get free content.

It’s believed to be the first college paper to attempt any sort of effort to get readers to pay for online content.

“It’s a beginning step in establishing the fact that what we produce has value outside of our immediate market, and people ought to be willing to pay for that,” O’Collegian general manager Raymond W. Catalino told the Chronicle.

• Know of anything going down this week that I can train my newfound video skills on? Let me know! I’m always reachable at ahyland@ljworld.com.