1) LIS Announcements – The group reviewed and edited emails to be distributed to LIS regarding ERP participants, “stopping things” and about the Segue sunset.  We agreed these will be sent as  separate emails.  Mike will also send a separate email to ERP participants to let them know that a general announcement will be distributed.

2) ERP celebrations – The college will be holding a college-wide celebration for ERP folks sometime in May or early June.   We discussed perhaps having some smaller LIS gatherings as well, since the larger one may feel slightly impersonal. Timing is an issue, since retirements are happening anytime from June to November.  Carol will be coordinating.

3) Goals/Projects – We talked more about what should happen to ideas coming out of the advisory group meetings, how we can keep faculty informed, and how we process them internally.  Shel will meet with Carrie Macfarlane and Bryan Carson to review the list of items compiled from this year’s advisory group meetings and discuss plans for tracking these ideas and their outcomes.  Jim Beauchemin should also be invited to this meeting.

4) Project Directory – Mike and Chris Norris are beginning work on this.  We talked a bit about the difference between a goal and a project, with a fair amount of semantic wrangling over nomenclature, but eventually we all came to the common understanding that for each LIS goal, there will be a series of projects and or other discrete steps enacted in support of achieving the goal.

5) MIIS/Midd new programs – Jeff is gathering information on  frequency and types of formal (as well as occasional/informal) communications between Midd and MIIS library and IT staff, at the request of Dave Donahue (who is tracking this for all areas across campus).  As Monterey and Middlebury explore joint academic program offerings, we’ll need to be assess how these will be supported by and/or otherwise impact LIS.

As part of the run-up to the publication of the issue, which will take the form of an anthology of the best writing and resources that contemplate the future of various topics, we’ve set up a delicious account and are crowdsourcing the collection of readings.

If you happen to use delicious and have bookmarked particularly good readings and resources on topics such as the future of reference, the future of the book, the future of the web, and so on, please feel free to suggest materials by tagging them for:academiccommons. (There is a brief description of how this works also on-line.)

Thanks so far to Mike Lynch for suggesting some good materials on the future of reference.

– mike

A January 2008 report by a research team (CIBER) at University College London for the British Library and JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee that promotes the use of academic IT in the UK, shows that while most young people in the US and UK are completely at home with computers, they rely on the most basic search tools and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information they find on the web. The report ‘Information Behavior of the Researcher of the Future’ also shows that traits commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are becoming the norm for all age-groups, from young students through undergraduates to professors. The study warns that young people are dangerously lacking in informations skills and presents the challenges for library and information services in meeting the needs of researchers.

The Executive Summary of  the report is a good read (and worth a look just for the cover graphic). You can find the full report here, and more recent publications of the JISC group, e.g., Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World, are listed here.

I have been working on a new WordPress theme for use at Middlebury. I wanted to create a flexible theme that could be used for a variety of sites or could be used to evolve a small simple site into a larger more complex one. I also wanted to create a theme with options similar to those found in Segue, to encourage Segue users to try out WordPress.

Variations on a theme
The default settings for this theme will likely be similar to those of the Kubrick theme, the current default WordPress theme (named after the the theme creator’s favorite director, Stanley Kubrick). While the Kubrick theme is a great design, it’s a shame you can’t tweak it much beyond changing the header font and gradient color. So the theme I am developing has options for changing the color of the background, header, sidebars, links and text.

As well, I am working on options for setting the overall width of the site (or choosing to make it variable) and the width of the sidebars. The default theme only has a right sidebar so I’ve also added an option for including a left sidebar.

Rethinking WordPress Meta
There is no consistent way to log into a WordPress blog nor to find out what you can do on a given blog. Most WordPress sites include a “Meta” widget in the sidebar with links to “Log in” and “Site Admin.” You won’t know definitively what you can do on the site until you click on the “Site Admin” link and look around the dashboard.

The theme I am developing puts this “meta” information in the top right corner of the site in the background area (which seems like a good place for “meta” kinds of things…). Thus all sites that use this theme will have the log in link in the same place. In addition, after you have logged in, many of the common actions you might want to do on the site will appear in the same area (along with your name, to assure you of who you are). If you are an administrator of the site, you’ll see links to post, edit, users, widgets and themes. If you have been given the role of author on the site, you’ll simple see a link to post.

Apps Bar
I really like the way Google includes links to their suite of applications in the upper left corner allowing you to quickly jump from mail to calendar to docs…etc. I’ve done the same with this theme, currently including links to Segue, WordPress and Measure.

Submitted by Alex Chapin