Archive for March, 2009Office moves!March 27th, 2009 by Jeffrey RehbachSubmitted by Jeff Rehbach During the next week, you may spot lots of activity as several us move to new office locations: Jeff Rehbach: Voter 223 (Tom’s former office) Network Services RestoredMarch 27th, 2009 by Doreen BernierSubmitted by Howie McCausland We finally restored network services (interrupted over Holiday Break when a snowplow damaged a fiber cable) to the Marble Works (Vermont Campus Compact) and the Stone Mill. Technicians from Business Telephone Systems, our cable contractor, worked long hours in cold wind splicing numerous hair-thin strands of glass to complete the repair:
“Technicians from BTS splice and repair Middlebury’s fiberoptic cable on a telephone pole in Frog Hollow.”
We also FINALLY established high-speed network service at the Snow Bowl, after TelJet (one of our Internet Service Providers, and a purveyor of long-distance optical fiber services) completed installing a fiber cable between Bread Loaf and the Snow Bowl main lodge. The Bowl now enjoys the same network service as on main campus, including standard campus wireless.
Free Webinar: Creating a Customer-Focused Culture in Your LibraryMarch 27th, 2009 by Brenda EllisPosted by Brenda Ellis April 24th from 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm Open to all library staff, trustees, friends, and other interested parties. Visit the NELINET Event Details for more information: https://www.nelinet.net/eaccount/EventDetail.aspx?eventid=00000948 Contact C&SL Section President Larraby Fellows to RSVP and to get login information. larraby.fellows@ccv.edu Who was that in the Library?March 27th, 2009 by Judy WattsSubmitted by Judy Watts Our new Library has been in use for almost five years and still draws many visitors and requests for tours. This past week, Amara Lakhous, writer and freelance journalist, and film maker from Italy was our guest. Mr. Lakhous, with a translator, was traveling under the auspices of the U.S. State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program. His novel, Scontro de Civilta, which won the prestigious Flaiano prize, is a story of how immigrants such as Muslims, Eastern Europeans, and Filipinos, deal with personal identity crises while living in Rome. It was published in Arabic in 2003, Italian in 2006, French in 2007, Dutch and English in 2008, and is currently beiing made into a film. He is known through his novels, journalism, and film making as one of Italy’s most insightful cultural mediators. While at Middlebury, Mr. Lakhouse met with students and faculty in the Italian Department about his work, gave a lecture on Islam and immigration in Italy, and met with Jay Parini. Scronto di Civilta has been ordered for our collection. Main Library DisplaysMarch 27th, 2009 by Joseph WatsonSubmitted by Joseph Watson Display space in the Atrium is now fully booked for the rest of the Spring Term. Recent displays have been:
Upcoming displays will be:
We’re also serving as a location for comment boxes, collection boxes, promotional posters, etc. Working with the students to schedule and and install these displays is quite a challenge. As always, some of them have thier acts remarkably together and others, not so much. For instance, we’ve been approached by a student who would like to do an interactive work of art in the building later in the semester… she would have a web cam pointed at the piece, work on it, and take suggestions from people watching the web cam on what to do next. This might materialize into something really cool, or might fizzle into nothing. While we do all we can to assist the students, it’s really up to them to pull it off. I recently learned that students who want to sell anything on campus must first get a permit from CCAL. See go/lis?display for more information. Training session on Federal government information resources: past, present and futureMarch 27th, 2009 by Hans RaumSubmitted by Hans Raum On Wednesday morning, April 15 Hans will do a presentation at 9 am in room 105 for any staff members who would like to find out more about both printed and online information resources available from federal government agencies, from the CIA to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. This will be an opportunity to see some of the oldest and most interesting government publications we received early in the 1800’s to the some of the most useful websites created by various federal agencies. The U. S. government is the largest publisher in the world and government agencies quickly took advantage of the potential of the Web to make their services and information resources more widely available. Potential future developments will be discussed, along with their implications for our role as one of seven federal depository libraries in Vermont. Federal website of the month: http://recovery.gov Help Save the Yellow Cables!March 27th, 2009 by Elin WaagenThe Yellow Cable Program is rapidly drawing its last breath! LIS arts and Crafts ExhibitMarch 27th, 2009 by Elin WaagenThe LIS Staff Arts and Crafts exhibit has been scheduled in the Atrium of the Main Library for June 8 – 22. Please contact me to submit your art or craft work. I hope you will consider sharing your work – this promises to be a great exhibit! Discovery or NextGen CatalogsMarch 16th, 2009 by Joy PileSubmitted by Joy Pile Here’s the list from yesterday’s presentation, so that you can play around with these on your own. Encore (from III) at Georgetown University – scoll down to the Encore search box AquaBrowser (from Serial Solutions) Univeristy of Oklahoma – go to BOSS, Colby-Bates-Bowdoin test site. Primo (from ExLibris) - Vanderbilt University Endeca – North Carolina State University WorldCat Local -University of Washington Enterprise (SirsiDynix) - Cherry Hill Public Library Vufind (open source) Carli consortium Illinois Koha (open source, this is an ILS not just a OPAC overlay) Arcadia University Scriblio (open source developed by) Plymouth State University Blacklight (open source developed by) University of Virginia If you want to read more about this topic here’s a bibliography that I created for a session at this year’s Music Library Association conference, and a checklist of questions created by Vassar Music Librarian, Sarah Canino. Envisioning Transinstitutional Work in the Age of the CloudMarch 16th, 2009 by Michael RoySubmitted by Mike Roy Dear Colleagues, At the upcoming NITLE Summit, Bob Keift from Occidental College and I will be leading a session called ‘Envisioning Transinstitutional Work in the Age of the Cloud’ where we want to focus our collective attention on opportunities for doing our work in new ways that leverage technology and new and sometimes cloud-based models for providing services. We hope to focus on five such opportunities. Which five? We don’t know yet! That’s where you come in. We’ve set up a forum at http://doteducloudward.uservoice.com and a blog at http://doteducloudward.blogspot.com where you can tell us your thoughts on these matters. What are specific collaborations and business models that you are presently involved in and/or would like to see come into being, and would like to see discussed at our session? We’ve seeded the list with a few ideas of our own, some of which involve the cloud and some of which are older ideas perhaps more possible now within this new paradigm: cooperative collection development, shared ERP, outsourced high-performance scientific computing, warchest for open source development, and others. Please take 20 minutes in the next few weeks to review the list, vote on which topic you would like to see discussed, add new topics that others can vote on, and even volunteer to lead a discussion on one of the topics. And since this is one of those ‘wisdom of crowds’ efforts, feel free to share broadly with your colleagues. Interesting use of videoMarch 16th, 2009 by Sheldon SaxSubmitted by Shel Sax Dartmouth College has developed a short video to teach first year students about their library resources. The video is avaiable on youtube in the Dartmouth channel. You can access it at: Report on MyUOC ConferenceMarch 10th, 2009 by Ian McBrideI attended a conference yesterday on the MyUOC university home page project (http://macedonia.uoc.es/wordpressmu/edtech/my-uoc/), developed at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Essentially, it’s a personalizable home page based on the design of iGoogle that allows users to access widgets developed locally by the UOC staff, import widgets that they already use from iGoogle, or write their own (if they know how in HTML). The presentation was very impressive and our discussion with the UOC staff afterwards was fruitful. We were previously considering implementing the personal home page portion of our webredo project using ASP.NET Web Parts (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e0s9t4ck.aspx), which store personalized data about page controls in a custom SQL Server database. At the time, we believed this to be the best available solution to implement a custom home page, but our introduction to MyUOC has changed at least my opinion on this. Here are the advantages of MyUOC over ASP.NET Web Parts
And here are the disadvantages
Provided that we can get this working with Exchange, I’m confident that using this software will be a huge boost to our project plan for implementing personal home pages. I think the interface in particular will be one that people are excited about using and look forward to customizing and seeing every day. To detail the complex communications stack I discussed, here’s a diagram:
 From the Digital ArchivesMarch 9th, 2009 by Doreen Bernier
French Summer School Play – 1941 Whither the AD meeting notes?March 9th, 2009 by Michael RoyIn case you haven’t noticed, since LISt turned into a blog, we’ve stopped using LISt to publish the notes from our AD meetings. We’re now wondering if anyone misses hearing about the topics we’ve been discussing. One thought we’ve had is to morph the LIS Restructuring Blog, which is a secure blog that only folks in LIS can access, into a LIS Notes Blog, where any/all groups that have regular meetings and wish to share their notes with others can do so in a secure, semi-private space. This post asks three connected questions: One, should we get back into the habit of publishing these notes? Two, in general, would a single place where all these notes could reside be a welcome thing? And three, does a blog sound like the right place for storing this kind of information? Please use the comments below or send me an email. – mike Spring SymposiumMarch 9th, 2009 by Carrie MacfarlaneAn information session for participants in this year’s Spring Symposium was held on Wednesday night, and I attended on behalf of LIS. I shared our new Resources for Presenters site, which outlines the support that LIS and the CTLR offer. LIS will provide workshops on making maps and posters, feedback on practice run-throughs of oral presentations, and assistance with PowerPoint. In addition, the CTLR will run two public speaking workshops. The Undergraduate Research Office is expecting about 130 students to participate in this year’s symposium, which is scheduled for Friday, April 17 from 1-6 pm in McCardell Bicentennial Hall. This is the third annual Spring Symposium, and participants from previous years consistently report that it was a significant and rewarding experience. All presentations are open to the public. What’s up with teams?March 6th, 2009 by Michael RoyPeople have asked what’s up with teams. Here’s the deal. We have in hand self-nominations from across LIS, and we’re sifting through these nominations trying to decide which teams we should start with, and who should be on them. In addition to this, we’re also working with Sheila Andrus from Human Resources to develop some workshops for those in LIS either involved and/or impacted by the formation of teams. These workshops will address:
Once we’ve organized the workshops and recruited the teams, the teams will begin by going through these workshops together. Stay tuned! – mike LIS Faculty Divisional Advisory Group MeetingsMarch 2nd, 2009 by Brenda EllisSubmitted by Brenda Ellis Print Release Test Zone in Lib242March 2nd, 2009 by Elin WaagenSubmitted by Elin Waagen LIS has undertaken a very ambitious project to implement print management for all public printers. Starting on Thursday 2/26 and ending on Friday 3/5 (1 week), LIS will test one aspect of the print management solution in the Main Library. We will create a testing zone which will entail temporarily installing two print release stations in LIB242. The purpose for creating this test zone is to evaluate the print release station in real world conditions. We will be asking users to provide feedback about the print release stations. We have created documentation and signage to assist our users with this temporary change. Internal testing found the print release stations intuitive and easy to use. What is a print release station? A print release station allows users (faculty, staff, students, and guests) to release their print jobs to the printers rather than use the current configuration of automatically printing jobs to the printers. Why install a print release station? A print release station should reduce the number of unnecessary or duplicate print jobs from being printed, give the user greater control over their printing, and increase print availability. How does a print release station work? When a user sends a document to the printer, it queues on the print release station. The user must log into the print release station using their Middlebury username and password to view jobs they submitted. Media on Reserve – Scheduled for Film Screening SupportMarch 2nd, 2009 by Elin WaagenSubmitted by Elin Waagen We are testing a new procedure this spring to improve internal workflow and availability of media scheduled for film screening support. Films that are scheduled to be screened by Media Services staff will be set aside the morning of the screening by Main Circ staff – after cleaning, repairing (if needed) and verifying availability. This only applies to films that are listed in the daily Media Services screening schedule. Films are listed in the daily film screening schedule only when a faculty member requests that Media Services staff provide technical support to a class screening. There were no problems noted with this change during Winter Term trial, and initial feedback from Circ staff and student employees at the front desk has been positive. Please pass along questions and concerns. Report from MLA (music library) ConferenceMarch 2nd, 2009 by Joy PileSubmitted by Joy Pile
The 78th Annual conference of the Music Library Association was held February 18-22, 2009 in Chicago. Below are brief highlights from the Sessions I attended.
Music in ChicagoBlues and Gospel music: Horace Maxile: The southern migration of blacks to Chicago in the early 1900s helped produce a unique more sophisticated sound than New Orleans Jazz, with and intermingling of Blues and Gospel music. Some of the important figures in that amalgamation were Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Minnie, Thomas Dorsey and Roberta Martin. Paul Tyler: Folk music in Chicago – local music making rather than music consumption. The German beer gardens provided a venue in the late 1800s for Sunday afternoon music making and social activities. Tyler pointed out that the Sunday blue laws that prohibited the serving of alcohol and closed many businesses were instituted by the Anglo population and temperance movements against “immigrants”. German marshal music was used in a protest of the closing of these Sunday afternoon venues. In the radio era, Chicago station WLS promoted music through the “National Barndance” – a precursor and model for the Grand Old Oprey. The ethnic population originally from Eastern Europe made Chicago a major source for Polka music, with a distinct style. Chicago was also a center of Irish traditional music as well. Charles Matlock: Described house music – the sound and synthesizer dance music that evolved in Chicago after the closing of disco clubs. Consortial Collection DevelopmentTri-colleges – Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn Mawr have instituted a joint online catalog and consortial collection development policy using a joint approval plan from YBP and scores notification through Harrassowitz. They have mostly eliminated duplication, except for reference books. But these three institutions are within a ten mile radius of each other, and have a twice daily currier delivery – student requests are mostly filled the same day an item is ordered. ILSO – an Illinois based statewide consortium which includes remote borrowing, and grants to smaller institutions to develop specific, mostly digital collections available to all the institutions in the consortium. American Women (Women in music roundtable) – Described the lives and music of Blythe Owen and Victoria Spivey Alexander Street breakfast – product update. Talk from Jim Musselman, founder of Appleseed Recordings. Copyright: Is there a chance for change? This session was upbeat – as the legislative committee of MLA sees movement for change in the policy of pre-1972 recordings, to allow digitization and streaming of historic recordings produced between 1890-1964. Currently only 14% of this oeuvre has been reissued. The other major issue – orphan works also has legislation pending with will ease restrictions and standardize the process for “due diligence” in trying to locate a current owner of a copyright. NextGen Catalogs and Weeding an LP Collection (Small Academic Libraries Roundtable) Sarah Canino of Vassar presented a list of points to ask vendors when considering the acquisition of a NextGen catalog (or discovery tool). Several librarians whose institutions had moved to this technology also discussed some of the problems with these search interfaces as they are currently configured. I described the LP de-acquisition process here at Midd, and included information about perimeters from a small survey I conducted on MLA-L, information from MLA-L archives, and a forthcoming Notes article by Elizabeth Cox. (Sarah and I are co-chairs of this roundtable) Search, Hack, Mix, Create, Innovate, Communicate: Technology Solutions for Music Libraries – The session title was the draw. Misti Shaw demonstrated a software tool Camtasia, which she used to create library videos. Tom Pease of LC demonstrated an online collaborative program – Yahoo Orchestra Library. Tim Sestrick of Gettysburg College demonstrated del.icio.us. He mentioned that Pandora is the most popular music site tagged in del.icio.us. Jenny Colvin of Furman Univ. talked about widgets and demonstrated meebo. Jon Haupt , Southern Methodist University showed Twitter. Gerry Szymanski demonstrated Cha-cha a question answering service – that won’t replace our jobs, since the answers given are not always either complete or accurate. Collections and Digitization. – Northwestern University is the repository of the correspondence and scores that John Cage collected in conjunction with editing his book Notations. Jennifer Ward described the process for preserving the scores – which run the gambit from conventional music notation to objects with directions on how to play the piece. Most of the scores are still under copyright – so they aren’t digitizing that collection yet, but they are in the process of digitizing the correspondence. Sam Brylawski and David Seubert described the Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings (http://victor.library.ucsb.edu/), an online index to the master and published recordings of the Victor Talking Maching Company beginning in 1900. Joint Projects – Kathy Abromeit of Oberlin College, described the project of collaborating with Sing Out! Magazine to create an online index to folk song collections in anthologies (http://www.oberlin.edu/library/con/singout.html) Darwin Scott (formerly of Brandeis) and Pam Bristah of Wellesley, described some of the music related items that have been scanned for the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/details/texts) What’s Next? The Compact Disc as a Viable Format in the Future of Music Libraries – This topic was discussed from various points of view – a young concert violinist, a former president of the American Orchestra League, a president of a small recording company (Cedille Records) the VP of Digital Product Strategy of Universal Music Group and a music librarian. They all agreed that at least for the near future, the tangible artifact – a CD – will continue to be produced, once broadband is expanded so that music can be streamed in full band with, iTunes and other such services will supplant the CD – a process which will probably take place over the next 10 years or so. Users and Technology – Kristen Dougan of the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana described the music content contained in Google Books and the Open Content Alliance – there was some overlap of this session with the one on the OCA the afternoon before. Andrew Justice talked about our users and suggested reading “Born Digital: Understanding the first generation of digital natives” to better understand their use of libraries. Miscellaneous Bits & Pieces: Traditional and Virtual – Philip Ponella of Indiana University described the software they use to stream music. Terry Simpkins send out an invitation to attend a Webinar on this software. Hot Topics in Music Librarianship – A lively question and answer discussion on the issues facing us – including current budgetary concerns.
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