http://www.sfmoma.org/projects/artscope/#r=64

Months in the making, our annual report is now available on-line at http://blogs.middlebury.edu/lis/files/2009/10/2009-LIS-Annual-Report.pdf  for your reading pleasure. Thanks to Doreen for all of her hard work in putting this together, to all who contributed their words to this document, and to all for all the hard work that is documented within. It’s an impressive list of accomplishments!

We are already working on compiling next year’s report, with the hope that by writing throughout the year we won’t have to struggle to pull it all together at the end of the year.

– mike

Please feel free to ask questions, make comments, and add to this by way of the comments on this blog.

Our next leg in this journey will be to set goals around these areas, which we will be doing starting immediately.

- mike

Here’s a list of what’s happened so far; we’ll post updates as we continue to re-arrange things. (Please add other re-arrangements to this post as comments if we have missed something!)

Media Services

* Mary Backus is serving as interim manager of media services and Lab management and support

Help Desk

* Alex Chapin, Mack Roark, Barbara Merz, and Chris Norris are doing shifts at the service request desk; we anticipate asking others to help out here in order to provide coverage and allow that group to continue to make progress on various projects.

Circulation Services

* Rich Church is helping out with opening the building in the morning.
* Dan Frostman, Todd Sturtevant, and Nancy Reynolds are now doing shifts in the Main Library.

Systems and Networks

* Dave Guertin will be become more involved in system administration/programming for central systems

We very much appreciate the flexibility that everyone has shown to date. As we discussed at the staff meeting, we are working on a viable long-term staffing plan this fall which will be informed by the results of the upcoming offers of early retirement and voluntary separation, and by conversations with students, faculty, and staff about reconfiguring and reducing services. We anticipate having to continue to make adjustments to this short-term plan, and will send updates on a regular basis so that we can all be working from a common understanding of who is responsible for what services.

I am grateful that nobody was taping!

– mike

What I’m Looking For
(apologies to U2)

I searched Google, asked Mr. Jeeves
Queried About, Said Pretty Please
Said Pretty Please, said pretty please
And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for

I walked the stacks, the catalog
Keyworded WorldCat, and yet after all
Yet after all, yet after all
I still haven’t found what I’m looking for

I called the HelpDesk and Reference
Scoured my hard drive, tried to make sense
Oh I want to retrieve
I want to retrieve it!
And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for

We pick the tools and the taxonomies
Index our data as we please, as we please
Yet we still haven’t found what we’re looking for

We’ve made it easy to ask for topics for us to cover in LISt. Just go to http://tinyurl.com/listsuggestions and suggest the topic and who you would like to write about it. And of course, you can always volunteer yourself.

We’ve made a three-year commitment (that we can back out of on an annual basis if we feel like it!) to work with ArtStor and a small group of other colleges and universities on a shared image management system that ArtStor is calling Shared Shelf. The press release is at http://www.artstor.org/news/n-html/an-090714-shelf.shtml . Terry Simpkins and Mike Roy are the main representatives to the project, and we’ll be consulting closely with others as the project moves forward.

Now that I’ve been here for a year, I wanted to start a conversation about the future of LISt. I really like the idea of LISt, and believe that it does serve an important internal communication need, allowing LIS to understand better what is happening elsewhere in the organization. That said, I think it could be even better with some relatively modest changes.

Here are some of my thoughts on what we might do to improve things:

1. Develop a schedule of topics to be written up, and invite suggestions about topics to be covered. As it stands, I sense that LISt is somewhat random in terms of the topics we cover. If we planned ahead a bit, we might do an even better job of keeping ourselves informed of what’s going on.

2. Change to an every other week schedule? Is every week too ambitious? Should we consider scaling back to an every other week schedule?

3. Expand the contributors. We certainly want to include the newly formed teams in LISt. Who else should we ask to post regularly?

4. Link accomplishments to the end of the year report. If we got in the habit of posting significant milestones via LISt, the activity of compiling the end of the year report would be much easier.

Those are some of my thoughts on tweaks we might make. I welcome comments, and other ideas for ways in which we can make LISt more effective. Other ideas for improving internal communications are, of course, always welcome!

– mike