Archive for October, 2008Tech JargonOctober 17th, 2008 by Doreen BernierSubmitted by Terry Simpkins Here’s a good column about tech jargon. While many in our community might be comfortable with a higher level of technology (and therefore jargon) than perhaps Pogue’s NYT readers, he makes some good points that folks who send all-College messages (especially) regarding downtimes, instructional classes, etc. might do well to think about.
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/10/16/technology/circuitsemail/index.html
Notes from the AD Meeting on October 9, 2008October 17th, 2008 by Doreen BernierBudget Education – discussed how the budget lines for LIS are organized, focusing on the IT/Tech side. The fund structure was created years ago and reflects the divisions of the organization at that time. We talked about potentially redesigning the accounts to better reflect the new realities of funding programs and services for MIIS, language school 2nd sites, etc. Software budget is a challenge, as annual licensing costs are increase significantly for enterprise-wide products (such as Banner, Hyperion) and grow in proportion of expenditure relative to specialized software for academic/curricular purposes. Process for Planning Budget Cuts – Mike wants us to think about how various budget cut proposals would affect us in the short-, medium-, and long-term; what constituencies would be most affected by various cuts; etc. We’ll want to look at things that are desirable but not necessary, or speed up certain things we’re already thinking about, such as looking at our phone services for students. It’s probably worth modeling changes in our service hours. Area Goals due by mid-November. Will share with Faculty LIS Advisory Committee (FLAC) – posted on wiki https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/wiki/LIS/LIS_Goals_2008-09 Brainstorm how to get more of LIS to engage in discussions surrounding re-org - Mike will send out update via LISt on new proposals that have appeared on the blog. How can we lower the barriers to getting more staff comfortable using the Restructuring blog? We will ask for volunteers from each area to help folks get comfortable reading and posting to the Restructuring blog and send out email/LISt post. LIS Suggestion Box – creating a physical suggestion space to go along with the online suggestion box; Bryan Carrie and Mike have agreed to respond to all serious questions/suggestions; also encourage LIS folks who hear suggestions to post them either online or in the physical space Manager’s Meeting De-Brief – finding common topics for such a large group is difficult; hard to get to the heart of the topic within such a limited time frame; picking some tangible and specific topics might help focus conversation; the group may value the meeting as a way to interact more with Mike, and genuine expressions of interest or questions from Mike might be well-received 50,000 digitized maps availableOctober 17th, 2008 by Hans RaumSubmitted by Hans RaumGovernment Information ResourcesMore than 50,000 historical digitized maps are now available online at http://infoweb.newsbank.com/?db=SSMAP. The original maps are part of the U. S. Congressional Serial Set and they include a broad range of themes and cover from the early 1800’s to about the 1950’s. Early maps were created by expeditions that surveyed the American west, Alaska, and other parts of the world, as well as early surveys of cities, harbors and other geographic features for most of the country. Among the maps of local interest are a 1904 soil survey of Addison County and maps of Silver Lake, Lake Dunmore, and Otter Creek. Other maps provide detail of specific battles in the Civil War and some early city plans. Although the maps may be of greatest interest to geography majors, they may also be useful in supporting student research in geology, American history, and ethnic studies, among other disciplines.Beautiful Old LibrariesOctober 17th, 2008 by Patricia HornbeckSubmitted by Patty Horbeck Curious Expeditions has gathered together photos of the world’s most impressive old libraries. October is Cyber-Security Awareness Month: from acronyms to buzzwordsOctober 17th, 2008 by Nathan BurtSubmitted by Nate Burt/Amy Hoffman In the technology world we are typically barraged with acronyms full of useful meaning to we geeks. Lately, though, we’ve had numerous buzzwords sent our way that we’ve been eager to share with anyone willing to listen. Many of these buzzwords relate to what “evil-doers” in the computing space are doing with computers. It has only been a few years since we spoke of computer viruses and trojans with a mixture of amusement at some of the harmless ones, to fear or anger of those that deleted entire hard drives on the nth day of the nth month. The landscape has shifted, though, as big money now drives the theft of your computer’s power, information, and/or your pocketbook. Enter spam, phishing, rootkits, spyware, malware, grayware, adware, backscatter, and more. Some are infestations, while others are the result. Most are intended to trick folks out of their money. Some bits of software code silently observe your computer usage, while others pop up ads, and many more prompt you to send sensitive information, and the like. There has been a recent surge in notices that pop up in your web browser or as an alert to the operating system informing you of serious threats to the information on your computer – and urging you to take immediate action. This relatively new group of applications takes on a name quite appropriate for the season – SCAREWARE! Many computers have been infested with “Antivirus 2009″ and other relatives, many of which originate from web sources including infected video on social networking sites. Microsoft and others are hoping to put the scare back into the “evil-doers” in this Halloween season, though, through legal action. Boo!
for more on Cyber-Security Awareness Month: http://staysafeonline.org/
for more on “scareware” and pending legal action:
Can Technology be Kind?October 17th, 2008 by Judy WattsSubmitted by Judy Watts Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science School has a Kindness Lab that studies human behavior in order to develop tools, techniques, and products that enrich and enable our lives. http://www.spiritmag.com/2008_10/features/kindness-lab-1.php One-stop shoppingOctober 17th, 2008 by Joseph AntonioliSubmitted by Joe Antonioli Information Technology at Tufts University has created an integrated suite of Web 2.0 technologies, communication tools for “for teaching, learning, research, and co-curricular activities.” This is a great example of access, support and marketing all in on space. The site gives the user a gateway to each technology. It also includes help documentation, examples and links to suggested uses. For instance, on the wiki page-
Why Can’t Librarians and IT Departments Just Get Along?October 14th, 2008 by Michael LynchSubmitted by Mike Lynch Another interesting post, with audio, from Wired Campus. The latest edition of Tech Therapy covers the differences and similarities between library and IT staff, and discusses why these two groups can’t get along. Terry Reese’s Readex reportOctober 13th, 2008 by Michael LynchSubmitted by Mike Lynch Terry Reese visited us recently (thanks to Joe Toth) on his way to the 6th annual Readex Digital Institute. He has just posted a nice summary of the event. Staff Information session on U. S. Serial Set & Federal statistical sourcesOctober 13th, 2008 by Hans RaumSubmitted by Hans Raum There will be a staff information session on Wednesday morning, October 15 at 9 am in room 105 on the U. S. Congressional Serial Set, the American State Papers and the top ten federal statistical websites. Anyone who is interested in the topics is welcome to attend. Project Bamboo and SegueOctober 10th, 2008 by Alex ChapinSubmitted by Alex Chapin Sasha Woolson, a faculty member in the Spanish department, and I will be participating in workshop 2 of Project Bamboo, a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary initiative to define technology services needed to do research in arts and humanities. Faculty, librarians, computer scientists and information technologists from over 50 institutions/organizations will be attending. We will certainly talk about Segue as a resource in this area. I contributed to the project’s wiki a page on collaboration. Adam has been refining the Segue user experience (UX) to make it easier to use and more efficient. Many of these changes are so subtle you might not notice them. For example, Segue now remembers which editing mode you prefer, the last used settings on certain features such as copy/paste and what sites you have visited recently. Special thanks to Brian Carson and Shel Sax for reporting bugs and helping us with these refinements. See the Segue changelog for more information. How to ChaChaOctober 10th, 2008 by Michael LynchSubmitted by Mike Lynch Here’s a recent article from Seven Days, written by someone who answers ChaCha questions. For those who missed it, ChaCha was one of the tech tidbits mentioned by Mike Roy at Thursday’s lunch. More News RSS and a Dashboard UpdateOctober 6th, 2008 by Ian McBride
Off to the right is a more generic RSS aggregator for non-CMS news (though I’m using a CMS news feed in this test case). This and the CMS News Web Part will be styled so that they appear like the alternating grey rows on the CMS’s front page. Speaking of that Front Page, you might have noticed that it now has an active RSS link in most browsers. I added a feed of Front Page News today. Below is the Video Web Part. This is designed specifically for use with Middlebury’s streaming media server: MiddTube. You just enter the name of the video that you’ve saved to your (or another) account and the Web Part will become a player for that video. The neat thing about these Web Parts is that they’re fully user-configurable and moveable around the screen. I just have two more Web Parts to create: Blogs and Events. Once those are done I’ll start adding the styling so that this looks more production ready, but I’m guessing that this will be ready for testing near the end of this week or early into the next. Why restructure, anyway?October 6th, 2008 by Michael Royposted by Mike Roy I’ve posted on the LIS re-structuring blog a post about why we are going through this process right now. To read it, you’ll need to have an account on that blog, which you can get by asking Doreen (dbernier@middlebury.edu .) Save the date! Announcing an all LIS staff Web2.Opportunity!October 6th, 2008 by Elin WaagenSubmitted by Elin waagen Save the date! Announcing an all LIS staff Web2.Opportunity! • When: October 9th at 12 noon (to accommodate different work schedules and preferences, the session will repeat on 10/23 at 6 pm) From the Digital ArchivesOctober 6th, 2008 by Doreen BernierBanned BooksOctober 6th, 2008 by Doreen BernierSubmitted by Rachel Manning In looking for the Cuyahoga Falls Library catalog I came across this link in Celebration of Banned Books Week, September 27 – October 4, 2008. A neat little video on Censorship. NITLE Mailing Lists: NITLE-ITOctober 6th, 2008 by Michael RoyFor those of you who might not be familiar with NITLE’s many mailing lists to foster communication around shared interests within the NITLE network, I thought it might be useful to share a link to a page where they describe the lists and how to join them. That page is at: http://www.nitle.org/index.php/nitle/the_network/peer_networks_and_communities Of particular interest to some might be the NITLE-IT list, which of late has had some very interesting exchanges. Cataloging Policy and Original Cataloging TeamOctober 6th, 2008 by Doreen BernierSubmitted by Cynthia Watters Cynthia Watters returned at the end of August from a summer travelling the western U.S. in a small camper/van. She had a wonderful time and now is readjusting to the normal working environment. Japanese Collection These materials are headed for the Japanese Collection and will increase it by about 50%. The Japanese Collection is currently classed according to an old system devised by a Harvard librarian in 1943. It is both outdated (try classing something on computers…), complex, indexless, and non-standard, but it’s what the original collection came with when we acquired it from the Japanese summer school. Now seems the time to bite the bullet and reclass the collection in the LC classification used in the rest of the library. It’s a big project, but the new books can be classed in LC in much less time than in the current system. As Cynthia began the project, she realized that it was an opportunity to add Japanese characters to our older records. New records routinely include Japanese characters, but, until a few years ago, they were not imported into MIDCAT from the OCLC database. Since one way of determining LC call numbers is to search the record on OCLC, we can overlay our record with the OCLC record with Japanese characters. In this way a project continues to grow in scope, but it should provide a great addition to our Japanese collection and its use. Theater Orchestra scores Read a Banned Book!October 6th, 2008 by Elin WaagenThanks to Janine Podraza for organizing a beautiful display in the Main Library Atrium for Banned Books Week 9/27 – 10/4.
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