What’s new or will be new this fall

When our undergraduate students return to campus in the upcoming days and weeks, they will face a set of changes to our environment, and will likely have questions about these changes. To help us all understand what has changed, and who to point to if there are questions about any of these things, we’ve put together this handy index of changes for your perusal and as a reference.

Current Changes to Know About

Mobile/Portal
We’re launching a pilot project to provide mobile and tablet users a friendlier way to access our resources. This same project will also provide a customizable portal for desktop and laptop computers. Joe Antonioli can provide more information about this.

Campus Manager
We will be making significant changes to Campus Manager, the software we use to keep track of devices to our network. These changes will happen in mid to late September. Until then, we will likely not be using Campus Manager at all.

Virus Campaign
We’re starting a campaign to get 100% of all College machines to be regularly scanned for viruses. This may result in an increase in questions about how to use symantec. And to make matters even more complicated, we’re also looking at possibly replacing symantec with a different product. Stay tuned on that.

Summon (also added to 2010-11 Annual Report)
The library has implemented an integrated resource discovery system from Serials Solutions called Summon (go\summon).  Summon indexes over 90% of our library resources — MIDCAT, ContentDM, online databases, indexes, and journals — in one combined resource, making it far easier than ever before to get a wide spectrum of results when searching.  Summon also offers tools for filtering search results that are similar (although, in some respects, more powerful) to those found on common websites such as Amazon.com.

Music Library Move
In May, the library moved ca. 32000 music books and printed music, 21000 CDs, and 1500 DVDs from the Music Library in the Mahaney Center for the Arts to the Davis Family Library building.  Most of the printed materials are now located on the 3rd floor of Davis.  The CDs are behind the circulation desk (but available for check-out) and the DVDs, periodicals, and reference collection are being integrated into the main library’s collection.  The move when very well, a tribute to the fine planning done by the Space Team and others in the User Services and RCS areas.

Moodle and the Course Hub
We have just launched Moodle and the Course Hub (http://moodle.middlebury.edu and http://courses.middlebury.edu ) and are hosting training sessions for faculty for use this fall.

DVDs
We’ve moved thousands of DVDs to the circulating collection, which means easier browsing and many more DVDs available to check out from the library.  We have also combined what was a “split” collection (meaning, some titles were classed using the Library of Congress classification system, and some were classed using a locally-developed system using the “MCTR” prefix), which will help reduce staff processing time.

Ebooks
Through a partnership with a company called EBL, the library has added ca. 44,000 eBooks to MIDCAT (go/midcat) that are now available to users “on-demand.”  Under this pilot project, users can access any of these titles from any networked computer and from many hand-held devices as well.  Titles that are accessed 4 or more times are automatically purchased by the library.  For titles that are accessed 1-3 times, the library is charged a small usage fee.  We do not incur costs for titles that are not accessed at all (or only very briefly), thus ensuring that the titles we purchase are titles that are needed and used.  We hope this results in added convenience for users as well as a way to more specifically target acquisitions dollars to materials that are actively used and needed.

iPad Loaners
We’ll soon be loaning out iPads in the way that we loan out laptops and cameras and other devices. If you haven’t yet had a chance to try out an iPad, you might consider taking one for a spin.

PaperCut for Copiers, too
We’ll be using papercut to allow copying as well as printing. Details to be posted on the wiki.

The return of loaning/borrowing audio CDs for Interlibrary Loan
With the move of the music library to Davis Family Library, we will resume loaning and borrowing audio CDs via Interlibrary Loan.

Four New Smart Classrooms in the MCFA
Over the summer, we built four new smart classrooms in the MCFA, one of which has a built-in video recording capability.

Mac Management Tool
We’ve launched a new mac management tool (called Caspar) that will allow us to do system management on Macs in the same way that we can with PCs.

Lynda Video Tutorials
The recently launched lynda video tutorials (http://go.middlebury.edu/lynda ) are proving to be very popular.

Menu Feeds
We’ve re-written the way the dining application works so that it is possible to see the ingredients of the food served at Middlebury’s dining halls.

On the Horizon


Banner Hosting
As many of you may have already heard, we are moving the hosting of Banner to a facility in Florida that SunGard manages. This won’t happen until much later in the fall. Stay tuned for more details on how this change will impact users of this system.

Stats Lab
If you see architects in the ground floor measuring things, that’s because we are planning to convert  Library 140 to a stats lab for use by the economics department and others.

Mission Continuity / Disaster Recovery
Process inventory work continues with identified functional areas of the College and soon, Monterey.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *