Archive for the ‘LIS Administration’ Category
October 27th, 2009 by Michael Roy
At last week’s LIS Strategic decisions, we presented the results of our strategic planning efforts, which are a set of four strategic areas that we have chosen to focus on. The a .pdf of the presentation can be found at http://blogs.middlebury.edu/lis/files/2009/10/LIS-Strategic-decisions.pdf , while a longer document that goes into greater detail about the process can be found at http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcst5th3_2chx2w2gq .
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
October 27th, 2009 by Michael Roy
As we discussed at September’s staff meeting, we are in the process of re-arranging our work in order to continue to function with reduced staff. Some of this involves stopping or reducing services, and some of this involves asking people to pitch in and do work in other areas.
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.
October 16th, 2009 by Doreen Bernier
Middlebury will be participating in the EDUCAUSE Live! online
seminar with special guests Tracy Mitrano, Director of IT Policy, Cornell
University, and Heather Joseph, Executive Director, Scholarly Publishing
and Academic Resources Commission, on October 23, 2009. For those interested in attending, the seminar begins at 1:00 p.m. in Library 145.
For more information, please visit http://net.educause.edu/live for event
details, including program and speaker.
October 1st, 2009 by Doreen Bernier
Please note the reduction in library hours for the upcoming midterm break. Music and Armstrong Libraries will be closed during the break, reopening on Tuesday, 10/13 from 9:00am-5:00 pm. Also, on October 12th the libraries will be closed for an all LIS staff in-service day.
Friday, 10/9 – close at 8 pm
Saturday, 10/10 – open 9 am – 5 pm
Sunday, 10/11 – open 9 am – 5 pm
Monday, 10/12 - CLOSED for in-service day
Tuesday, 10/13 – open regular hours day prior to classes resuming 7:30 am – 1 am
To view a calendar indicating recess hours for each library, click on the link to the library webpage below and select “Exceptions to Normal Summer Hours”.
September 14th, 2009 by Doreen Bernier
The LIS Web Team presented their recommendations for AD approval See: https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/wiki/LIS/LIS_Website_Recommendations
Here’s the high-level summary; many other details in the above link, explaining thinking/research leading to these recommendations.
We recommend that the LIS Website consist of the following elements:
- A landing page with contact information, location information, hours, and links to our content offerings.
- A blog that contains information about the organizational mission and structure as well as news and articles from LIS staff.
- A wiki that holds the technical and procedural documentation maintained by LIS staff, chiefly the Helpdesk and Telephone Services documentation.
- A website in Drupal for access to Library resources.
- Subject guides for academic departments and disciplines in SubjectsPlus.
- A search portal for Library resources
We also recommend that there be some consistency across all sections of the LIS Website. Every page should have a unifying graphic element (eg, a logo) to make it clear to the user who has arrived via search that they are on a Midd-LIS page. Every page should invite feedback (”Was this page helpful?).
General questions, comments and discussion continued.
- Blog consolidation issues were discussed with the possibility of maintaining one blog for all of LIS or possibly one for internal and one for external audiences. Ian McBride suggested using one blog with various categories to assist in this issue.
- White Whale will assist in developing a unifying theme for the Library landing page.
- Concern was addressed regarding White Whale’s home page design only showing Library and not including technology links. Should they prepare two links for Library and Technology?
- We should streamline services to utilize more self-service features and contain them in one place.
- Should we include things like:
- where can we find a free computer?
- Link system status to show which printers are up and running
- Room and thesis carrel availability
- A lively discussion occured regarding LIS Staff directory photos. Discussion will continue at a future date
- Governance and advisory groups – access and structures should be made available to users
- New helpdesk software – Where are we going? Software is currently being evaluated. We need to choose a product to create web-based forms with seamless integration
Recommendations were approved by the Area Directors
Info desk discussion: it was decided to not continue staffing the info desk as of September 1st. For the short term, the desk will remain. Possible ideas for the space would be to place additional computers at the desk for walk up usage or possibly a large monitor. Mary would talk to Joseph about reproduction of brochures and materials. Gate statistics will no longer be monitored and the info desk phone extension should divert to Circulation. Carol will prepare a write-up for discussion regarding the possibility of shifting room reservations to Scheduling. An announcement needs to be prepared stating the info desk closure. Mary agreed to write something for LISt.
August 24th, 2009 by Michael Roy
Submitted by Mike Roy
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.
August 14th, 2009 by Jeffrey Rehbach
Submitted by Jeff Rehbach
Charles Gwathmey, of the design firm Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, died on Monday, August 3. GSAA designed our new main library. Mr. Gwathmey was present at the dedication of the library in October 2004, and spoke that weekend as part of the Clifford Symposium on October 9, 2004, sharing many of his personal concepts and ideas that led to the design of our wonderful facility. With colleagues at GSAA who worked closely with us in the early part of this decade, we offer our sympathy and mourn this loss.
Announcement on Gwathmey Siegel web site
Obituary from The New York Times
July 24th, 2009 by Doreen Bernier
Submitted by Mike Roy
Henry Schaffer, Professor Emeritus of Genetics and Biomathematics and Coordinator of Special IT Projects and Faculty Collaboration – North Carolina State University
Sarah Stein, Associate Professor of Communication and Virtual Computing Lab (VCL)
Academic Outreach and Collaboration – North Carolina State University
Topic: Cloud Computing for the Academic Institution
Date: July 29, 2009
Time: 1:00 p.m. EDT (12:00 p.m. CDT, 11:00 a.m. MDT, 10:00 a.m. PDT).
International participants: You may wish to visit this external time-conversion website to calculate the start time in your time zone. Duration: 1 hour
The Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) is a cloud computing solution that is designed to address the unique needs of academic institutions. Computational resources for teaching faculty, students, and researchers require flexibility in order to be effective in diverse environments. The VCL enables this in an unprecedentedly affordable manner. This talk will present an overview of the VCL and discuss the computing resource problems that initiated it, the advantages and limitations of its use, and its pedagogical impact, as well as the economic implications of cloud computing.
The event is free, but registration is required and virtual seating is limited. REGISTER NOW.
July 20th, 2009 by Chris Norris
The LIS Project Directory initiative is underway! For those who may have missed the brief introduction at the May 21st All LIS staff meeting, one of the primary goals of this effort is to gather information about projects that LIS is (or will be) involved in, and to make this information available to members of our community. The expectation is that the LIS Project Directory will help raise awareness about the diverse and exciting work that we do in support of the College’s mission and help inform our planning efforts.
Starting this week, a familiar representative from each area will begin connecting with workgroup leaders, team leaders, and project managers to collect a basic set of information about each project that LIS is involved in. Ron McKinnon, Joseph Watson, Dan Frostman, and Bryan Carson will be reaching out to their respective areas to gather this data and also to ensure that we are collecting the right information about projects. Once the collection effort has concluded, the LIS Administration will review all of the projects for inclusion in a web-based LIS Project Directory.
Several people have asked for clarification about what should be considered a “project”. For the purposes of this initiative, a project is currently considered to be a one-time, multi-task endeavor that has a specific scope of work, a beginning and an end, and concludes with a deliverable result. Some projects may require planning or involve the efforts of multiple people, others may require sponsorship or even budget approval. It is important to note that daily work activities and related responsibilities are not currently considered projects.
So, be on the lookout for these “project scouts” as they begin to visit workgroups to find out what we have going on! If you have questions about this initiative, please feel free to contact me at x5480 or cnorris@middlebury.edu.
- Chris
July 16th, 2009 by Michael Roy
Submitted by Mike Roy
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.
July 16th, 2009 by Michael Roy
Submitted by Mike Roy
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
June 12th, 2009 by Michael Roy
After much conversation, we are pleased to announce the three teams that we are forming, and the membership of those teams. The teams are meeting next week to develop their plans and charges, at which point we can update everyone with more concrete information.
LIS Website
Jeff Rehbach - sponsor
Elin Waagen- leader
Jim Beauchemin
Doreen Bernier
Jess Isler
Ian McBride
Carrie Macfarlane
Barbara Merz
Liz Whitaker-Freitas
Digitization
Terry Simpkins-sponsor
Mike Lynch-leader
Steve Bertolino
Arabella Holzapfel
Rachel Manning
Danielle Rougeau
Michael Warner
Scott Witt
Curricular Technology
Shel Sax – sponsor
Alex Chapin – leader
Joe Antonioli
Bryan Carson
Sue Driscoll
Adam Franco
Dan Frostman
Joy Pile
Mack Roark
May 22nd, 2009 by Michael Roy
1. Various updates:
- Project Directory: Mike Roy and Chris Norris are in the early stages of designing a project directory for all of LIS that will will help raise awareness about the various projects that LIS is involved with and help clarify how these projects relate to specific departmental and institutional goals. We are really looking forward to working with each area to compile a comprehensive overview of projects that can be shared within LIS and beyond.
- Goal setting : We hope to establish LIS-wide goals for the upcoming year by the of July. These goals should like to our mission, main things, and the projects (listed in our project directory, see above) can then be linked to these goals. We hope to offer better guidance and support in the formulation of goals.
- Teams . We will start with three teams: educational technology, LIS website, and digitization; training on teams to take place June 16th – June 19th. Stay tuned for more information.
- Early Retirement Program. We have been developing plans for how to keep LIS functioning and delivery quality services with a reduced number of people. We will be going to SRC very soon with a plan ; our focus is on a) redeployment and b) stopping things.
- Web makeover: Lots going on as we move forward with this project. See http://go.middlebury.edu/webmakeover/ for the latest news, schedule, and opportunities to participate in this project.
2. Ron McKinnon gave a very nice presentation on the accomplishments of the Phoenix Project to date, and its future plans.
(If I left anything out, please feel free to add comments.)
May 8th, 2009 by Judy Watts
Submitted by Judy Watts
I’m headed to Scotland tomorrow, and while people don’t need to know the details of where I’ll be, it may be useful for them to know that I will be away. Here’s what I did to enter that information in a place that everyone can see. In Outlook, open
Public Folders – All Public Folders – LIS – LIS Calendar
Enter your time away and save the entry. If you want to put it on your personal calendar, open it again, pull down the “Actions” menu and click on “Copy to personal calendar:. (Or, while you are creating the item, click on “Invite attendees” and invite yourself. Accept the invitation when you are back in your Outlook mail and it will be on your personal calendar.)
If you don’t use Outlook, you can ask someone who does, including the Information Desk, to make the entry for you.
Thanks for doing this. It helps us all.
May 8th, 2009 by Michael Roy
Submitted by Mike Roy
In the upcoming months, I am planning on working with Chris Norris to develop a project directory for all of LIS that will allow us to present to ourselves and our constituents an overview of all of the projects that we are working on. In addition, I am also keen to see us improve upon our goal setting process from last year so that we also have a comprehensive list of all of our goals in a single place for us to see what we’ve committed to accomplishing in the upcoming year.
In thinking about how to approach these two activities, I’ve begun to wonder: is there a difference between a goal and a project? Are there projects that can’t be described in the language of goals? Are there goals that can’t be described in the language of a project? It seems to me that they could sensibly be handled with a single list.
As I envision this list of our goals and projects would let us know:
- the name of the goal or project
- a description
- the date it would begin
- the date it would end
- the people and resources involved in achieving it
- who would benefit from it being completed
I’m interested to hear from the rest of LIS about whether or not they think this is the right information to keep track of, what differences they see between goals and projects, and what we can do to optimize the benefit of this, and minimize the cost (time and energy) of maintaining such lists.
March 16th, 2009 by Michael Roy
Submitted 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.
March 9th, 2009 by Michael Roy
In 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
March 6th, 2009 by Michael Roy
People 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:
- What is the role and responsibility of the sponsor/mentor of a team?
- What is the role and responsibility of a team leader?
- What is the role and responsibility of a team member?
- How does the relationship of a supervisor of a team leader or a team member change when their staff member is now also leading or a member of a team?
- How should we communicate our plans, priorities, resource needs, and accomplishments?
Once we’ve organized the workshops and recruited the teams, the teams will begin by going through these workshops together. Stay tuned!
– mike
February 13th, 2009 by Doreen Bernier
A group of folks from LIS and the rest of the College have been meeting to develop a plan for rolling out print management to campus this Spring. The system, which uses PaperCut to manage print jobs, initially will require people wanting to print to release their print jobs via a control panel. In the Fall we intend to begin issuing print quotas. After a quota has been reached, the person would need to pay for their print outs using a credit card. As the project moves forward, we’ll post more information.
This week we’ll be running a test print release station at circulation in the main library; come by and try it out!
February 6th, 2009 by Doreen Bernier
Candidates for New Teams (with sponsor in italics)
We will begin the roll-out of new teams by choosing from the list below three or four teams to start with.
- Curricular Technologies (Peddie )
- Digital Archives/Collections/Library services (Simpkins)
- Information Security (Cutter)
- Language Schools/Bread Loaf/MMLA support (Roy)
- LIS Web presence (Rehbach)
- Training/Workshops (including internal LIS cross-training) (Backus)
The names listed to the right of each team above is the team sponsor. The sponsor’s role is to help provide a framework for the team and the resources needed to ensure the teams success, but the sponsor is not the team leader.
If you are interested in being a part of one of these teams, please contact the team sponsor with the following information:
- why you are interested in this team,
- a brief outline of the projects/activities/services you think the team should pursue.
- if you would like to be considered for the role of team leader, please mention that and also submit a draft charge for the team
- you may also nominate others for membership and leadership of a team.
- please make your interest known by Friday February 20th.
- please note: in some cases, we may ask people to join a team who haven’t volunteered!
We’ll announce the first round of teams, team leaders, and team members shortly thereafter. We’ll post more detailed information — including expectations for team members, team leaders, and team sponosors — soon on the LISt blogspace.
Existing Committees and other team-like things
Here is a list of groups that already exist that are team-like in their approaches and membership; we expect that as we move forward with our roll-out of more formal teams, these groups will be included in our list of ‘formal’ teams. (If there are other team-like things not on this list, let us know and we’ll add them.)
- Library Hours
- LIS Green Team
- Social Committee
- Institutional Repository Working Group (IRWG)
- Emergency Management Committee
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- Reference Collection Advisory Group
- Info Desk
- Collection Development advisory group
- Browsing team
- E-newsletter
- Special Collections
- Music Library
- Science Library
- Government Docs
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Teams Proposed to be formed later
Because we want to be thoughtful in how we manage the balance of responsibilities within teams and the responsiblities within workgroups and areas, we want to begin with a small number of teams, and then once we better understand how to do this, to launch additional teams. Teams that we intend to pursue later in the process include:
- Communications (include Orientation planning/info/documentation)
- General Web development, innovations, support (incl. ADA/universal access)
- Service Points (incl. Information Desk)
- Space Utilization (incl. ADA/universal access; classroom/lounge “tech infrastructure”)
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- Audio-Video capture/edit/distribution
- Databases & Data Warehousing
- GIS services
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As part of this initiative, we will be developing a series of trainings that will allow staff impacted by this to learn more about managing work through teams. This includes training on the definitions of roles on teams, communication strategies, project management techniques, and conflict resolution. As this progresses, we will keep everyone informed about these professional development opportuntities.
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