Area 51 Notes – Nov. 19, 2009

After a long hiatus, your foreign correspondent from Area 51 is back, bringing you meeting notes and minutes from that most mysterious of areas, LIS Administration.

We began the meeting with a discussion of possible dates for system down time in order for ETI to perform maintenance.  ETI normally requires 2 days a year for maintenance, and usually this can happen between Christmas and New Year’s.  This year, unfortunately for us, J-Term begins early, which would push the usual maintenance period over New Year’s Day.  We’d prefer not to ask staff (and staff would prefer not to be asked) to work over the holiday.  The beginning of the break is also not a great time, since that is a particularly active time for gift processing in College Advancement.  MIIS also needs to be considered in this decision.  We talked about pushing the down time to the interim between J-Term and Spring semester, and Jeff will propose other possible dates to Mike to solve this vexing problem.  Mike will discuss the impact of various date proposals with President’s Staff.

Next, we talked about providing Middlebury support for urgent MIIS needs, especially those occurring post-5pm ET.  We need to identify after hour support issues, and we may also need to ask MIIS to re-structure some of their work so that we can provide more assistance to them during Middlebury’s business hours.  We also need to tighten up our on-call structure and communicate this to MIIS.  Carol will start the process of pulling together a phone-tree flowchart.

We reviewed a plan from Curricular Technologies Team to shut down Segue v1, which is currently read-only. CurrTech would like to send an all faculty message announcing version 1 shut-down.  However, some particularly complex v1 sites can not move to v2 until certain errors are resolved.  Mike asked for an action plan to be developed to assess v1 sites with errors, and that we move shut down of v1 to May 30th, contingent on a well developed migration plan for active sites including sites from LS and Bread Loaf.  Shel will pass this onto the CurrTech Team.  As an aside, the ADs agreed that we would prefer that servers not be summarily shut down (i.e. permanently) before getting permission from LIS Admin.

Mary led a discussion about possible lab closures and changes.  Beginning in January, LIB140 will become a virtual lab with students using their own laptops.  The Sunderland labs were also discussed.  The summer Language Schools use these labs, and we need to work with them to discuss options.  We should also be looking at use of the CFA music carrels.  These changes will be added to the “things to stop doing” list.  We will be able to use some of the deaccessioned equipment to upgrade computers elsewhere.

In other news:
the Google App’s team (that’s team with a small “t”) needs to start begin holding regular meetings (every 3 weeks) as we continue to investigate the use of this technology for some of LIS’s needs.

Collection Management is drafting a revised gift policy, which we will discuss with College Advancement.  We would like to try to have the revised policy in time for the next FLAC meeting.

We moved the deadline for goals-setting to 12/15.  Carol will work on drafting AD Team goals, which are likely to include all or some of professional development, operations/administrative goals, area support, space and training/education team members and charges.  The goals are intended to be 12-18 month goals.

Thanks for reading,

Terry

One thought on “Area 51 Notes – Nov. 19, 2009

  1. Brenda

    I’m fine with removing those problematic laptops in Lib 140 (even though I would have preferred replacing with desktops if we had more money and staff, which we don’t) – but why call it a virtual lab? It will simply be a smart classroom. It will be as much of a virtual lab as anywhere else in the library so why even use that terminology. Just be brave/straightforward and say its no longer a lab – period. Price of the cuts.

    Reply

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