Welcome back folks! DAS staff have been making progress on a variety of projects lately. Here are some of the highlights…

Mike Schuster has been working closely with Rogelio and Admissions staff to update the Admissions Online Pre-Application Supplement. Mike also recently modified the course registration counts page in BannerWeb for the Registrar’s office.

Rob Pekor has been working with Travis on Banner/ListManager integration, and with College Advancement on the dynamic online Honor Roll and the Phone-a-thon data interface.

Travis Stafford has been working with Rob on Banner/ListManager integration, with Ian on the web forms migration, and with Shel Sax on a prototype web application for the BLSE teacher network. Travis is also rapidly becoming an expert HEAT user.

Liz Whitaker-Freitas has been focused on the upcoming Hyperion System 9 upgrade/migration, and has been working closely with Velaris (our Hyperion professional services vendor) and our functional and technical LEADS, to prepare for the late-September migration.

Ian McBride recently re-developed the online Directory applications for Middlebury and Monterey, has been working with Rob Pekor on the online Honor Roll project for College Advancement, and is currently working on a “News Dashboard” web application for College Communications.

Chris Norris has been preparing materials to fill a number of open DAS staff positions, coordinating project meetings with Middlebury and MIIS staff, managing vendor relationships, conducting ListManager workshops, and re-vamping GO.

Finally, if you missed the recent post about GO on the student-run middblog, you can check it out here: http://midd-blog.com/2008/09/14/go-forward-young-man/

We’re introducing a new feature to LISt: bizarre photos culled from our offices. We’ll post the picture one week and give folks a chance to guess who they think might be the owner of the object depicted. (If you know, then don’t guess, please!)

Electronic Reserves

Thanks to the effort of three cataloguers, Sue Driscoll, Marlena Evans, and Kristen Geoghegan, the mountain of ERes documents added at the beginning of the semester was accomplished with great speed. The workflow in Reserves was still hectic, but much more manageable. Thanks also to Michael Warner for initiating the collaboration!

Apples and Study Carrels for Seniors

* The first student arrived at the Main Library at 5:25 am
* 67 students were waiting outside when the door opened at 7:30 am
* A crate of apples helped ease the pain of the long wait
* 83 carrels were assigned by 8:33 am
* All but 40 carrels (out of 202) were assigned by late morning

Thanks to Maura and Steve for ensuring a smooth event and to the staff and student staff who came to work early to help process carrel requests.

Welcome back to Karin Gottshall!

Karin has re-joined Circulation Services as an on-call staff member, filling in for staff at Circulation and Reserves when and where needed.

Shelf Shift at Main

A major redistribution of books on the upper level is underway by Rich Church and his team of student workers. There may be some intermittent noise – we will try to minimize this as much as possible. Please let us know if you encounter complaints. Please alert users to possible location changes when referring them to shelves on the upper level.

We have completed an extensive rewiring and upgrade to the network serving the Youngman Football Stadium press box (that odd-shaped little house at the top of the stadium seating), providing higher bandwidth wired connections (for better webcasting and streaming video of the games) and wireless service. We have begun a project to extend TelJet-based fiber broadband network service to the Snow Bowl, running fiber from the existing network at Bread Loaf. This will provide the Bowl with the same network services available on main campus, a vast improvement over their current Spartan conditions. We hope (with fingers tightly crossed!) to have this completed before the start of this winter’s ski season.

This quarter’s issue of “Reference & User Services Quarterly” features a guest post entitled “Taming Technolust: Ten Steps for Planning in a 2.0 World” that the editor of the journal — M. Kathleen Kern– introduces with the following:

“This quarter, Michael Stephens of the popular Tame the Web blog offers advice on dodging “technolust” and how to recognize and deal with “technodivorce.” It isn’t all avoidance, though, as he provides ten positive steps for your library’s technology planning. Michael has a pedigree in technology planning as the former Special Projects Librarian at Saint Joseph County (Ind.) Public Library. He now teaches in the LIS program at Dominican University and recently authored two Technology Reports on Web 2.0 for the American Library Association. If you’ve heard Michael speak, you will recognize his straight-from-the-hip style. ”

It’s an interesting diatribe, and one worthy of further discussion. (Hint hint… use the comments!)