Here are just a few take-aways from the event:

• During our session on undergraduates as researchers, several faculty members agreed that determining whether or not a source is appropriate for use in a paper is one of the most important skills for student writers to learn; it also is one of the most difficult skills to teach.
• In a session on oral presentation skills, we learned that simply taking a deep breath as you approach a podium can help you speak more clearly.
• When working with first-year seminar faculty, some in the CTLR like to share this advice:  ”You are creating the students you want to see in your other classes.”
• Both students and faculty won’t always ask for help, even if they might need it. “We don’t know what we don’t know,” one faculty member pointed out.
• When planning a class or a workshop, start at the end (ask, “What do I want the students to have learned?”) and work backwards. This should help you decide which content to prioritize.

One more thing: The Mountain Top Inn is a really nice place!

Your campus accounts (email, file server, personal webpages) are deleted 6 months after graduation. You will receive email warnings about one month prior to account deletion. To ensure that you don’t lose any important data:

File backup from server: Visit NetStorage to retrieve files from file servers and save them on your own private backup (your own computer, portable hard drive, etc.) You may export your email to various email clients. If you do not already have a program configured, you may set up an email connection by following our email configuration instructions.
Forwarding email: you may forward your Middlebury College email account to another account of your choosing by visiting go/forward BUT THIS FORWARDING WILL CEASE TO WORK when your account is deleted after graduation.
Lifelong email: the Alumni Office offers a lifelong email forwarding account to all Middlebury alumni. Find out more at our alumni faq page.

Technical support for computers purchased through Middlebury College ends when you graduate. In the event of technical problems after graduation, we encourage you to contact the manufacturer directly:
Dell Technical Support: http://www.dell.com/support or 800-234-1490 (x7269080 for Latitude; x7269077 for Optiplex)
Apple Technical Support: http://www.apple.com/support or 800-800-2775.

In other words, we love you, but the responsibility for taking care of your computer, files, and email content after you graduate is your own. You’re one of the grown-ups now!

Additionally, we expect to have an “oversize” portion of the collection where the original DVD cases (e.g. some box sets, DVDs with irregular-sized booklets) are important for use or study, or can’t be easily transferred to the locking cases. This oversize section will be located behind the Circulation Desk, but the materials will circulate under the new loan rules and can leave the building.

Lastly, a smaller restricted collection of rare and/or expensive DVDs will continue to be kept behind Circulation and the old loan rules (students & staff 4 hours in-house, faculty 3 days) will still apply.

This new arrangement will not affect how Reserves works for faculty or students. When a professor asks to have a DVD put on Reserves for a course, LIS staff will retrieve the media from the open stacks/oversize/restricted, and it will be kept on Reserves, in the usual place behind Circulation and with the usual Reserves loan rules. At the end of the semester, when the media comes off of Reserves, it will be returned to wherever it came. (Note: videotapes, which have already been moved from behind Circ to open stacks on the main floor behind Government Documents, will work the same way.) However, since a more widely circulating media collection will result in more media being used away from the library and off campus, we encourage faculty to plan ahead for your Reserves needs, including film screenings.

This is a huge project for LIS, involving handling all the DVDs, and repackaging and reprocessing most of them. Not only most of the Media Collection DVDs, but also all of the Browsing DVDs will have to be repackaged. All “MCTR” DVDs, no matter where they will eventually be housed, will be reprocessed using the Library of Congress classification system, which we use currently for all books and some DVDs. The finished open stacks collection will be sorted by call number, not the current alphabetical arrangement used for Browsing. We plan to start work on all this in early June, and hope to be finished before Fall semester classes begin.

The Latin epic about the destruction of one civilization and the founding of another, Vergil’s Aeneid recounts the wanderings of the hero Aeneas from the ruins of Troy to the shores of Italy, and describes with moving detail the wars he must fight in order to establish a line of leaders that will eventually lead to the Roman Caesars. (Thank you to Randy Ganiban for the blurb!)

The Aeneid will be read from at the following times:
Friday: 3:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Saturday: 10:00 am – 4:00 pm
Sunday: 10:00 am – noon (or until completed)

Baklava will be provided, and if you’d like to read (usually done in 30 minute increments), you also get a text and a nifty authentic Olympic crown* while you read!

*Crown made in present-day, not in Ancient Greece. No Olympic medals or achievement of world records included with crown.

If you’re interested in signing up ahead of time for a reading slot, please contact Giulia Scelzo or Christian Brady.

The New England Chapter of the Association of College & Research Libraries had their annual conference this past Friday in Worcester, MA, and I attended. The conference lasted 7 hours and round-trip travel from Middlebury took 8. But there were actually some good discussions and the conference was thankfully not consumed by the oft-repeated refrain of “The printed word is dying! It’s the end of the world!” Its theme was “Embracing Our Electronic World: Challenges and Promises for Academic Libraries” but mercifully no one was required to hug anything electronic. Do librarians actually hug anything in the workplace? Doubtful. It would be unseemly.

Two breakouts sessions filled the morning, and I decided that I wanted to go to sessions that were geared more towards areas we in LIS haven’t been able to really explore yet. The first session was all about NJVid, a fascinating grant-funded repository put together by 8 (now 13) public and private universities and high schools in New Jersey. The archive holds preservation-level quality streaming media (video and audio) and is divided into 3 subcategories, the first 2 of which are currently available: “locally-owned,” “commercial,” and “learning-on-demand.” Locally-owned material is media owned by any of the member schools which has open access and can be viewed by anyone. (If you go to the NJVid site and click around, any media you’re able to view will be in this category.) Commercial media involves licensed or distributed material – including feature films and television series – available by username & password to faculty/staff/students of each individual school involved. Here in LIS, Circ and Media Services have long had a pipe dream of being able to provide streaming video over the web for classroom film screenings projection as well as on-demand access for students of classroom screenings a la Hulu. NJVid is enacting that very idea. The last category, learning-on-demand, is still in process but would be the next step of providing a repository and on-demand streaming services for classroom and guest lectures and campus events, similar to some of our own digital archives projects already underway in-house as well as our involvement with delivery avenues like the iTunes University Channel.

You can see why this presentation was interesting to me, but it was clear the amount of work needed to undertake a similar sort of repository would be way too much for one college or university. Even the collective schools in Vermont would be hard pressed, though possibly a broader coalition throughout New England may be able to pull it off. Of course, for it to work in NJ, there had to be a full year of promotion and buy-in among the schools, grant writing at the state and federal levels, and a ton of work on copyright clearance. Still, it was rather awe-inspiring to see how they’ve been able to pull it off.

My second session was with a librarian from MIT whose presentation was called “It’s a Mobile World; Where Do You Fit?” I was impressed with her correct use of the semicolon. Her talk centered on ways the MIT Libraries have worked on adding their presence to the mobile web. After doing surveys and finding that the Apple iPhone was by far (57%) the mobil device of choice of MIT students, they made an app in Apple’s App Store which gives real-time maps, bus routes, and hours of their various libraries. In the works is a partnership with LibraryThing that will hopefully lead to a mobile app for accessing MIT’s OPAC. They’ve added their libraries to the Foursquare database, and even created a library tour with Gowalla. The main message of her talk was that, especially in merged organizations, libraries shouldn’t be trying to replicate in-person or even desktop online services for the mobile web, but instead create services that are in line with the way our users operate the mobile web: “mobilize, don’t miniaturize.”

The second half of her talk was devoted to her latest toy, the iPad, of which she was able to buy 4 for staff use at the MIT Libraries. (Carol, we’re far more reasonable: we only want 1. We don’t even need the 3G version.) She encouraged us to think about what library services could look like on the iPad, keeping in mind that it’s not intended to reproduce a laptop’s functionality but be a tablet experience, and one that’s heavy on media usage. Her enthusiasm was great, but during the q&a period, it was clear that most libraries aren’t anywhere near the kind of integrated focus on usability that is part of MIT’s tech services (or have anywhere near MIT’s budget for tech). Still, the first half of the talk was useful in thinking about mobile services as inherently different than what we provide on the regular web or in our brick-and-mortar branches.

After lunch, our keynote speaker was the president-elect of ACRL and said what you’d guess the president-elect of anything would say about the recession, challenges facing us, and the crucial point that their organization would be instrumental in getting everything back on track. After that, vendors were hawking software, services, and databases costing many thousands of dollars, and handing out free pens. The last part of the afternoon was spent in optional round-table discussions with some of the presenters as well as with a “Technology Petting Zoo” which was a neat idea and involved getting to play with various technologies, including iPads, netbooks, video consoles (PS3, XBox360, Wii), Kindles, Twitter, Google Voice, the Kurzweil 3000 software, and digital cameras of the photo and Flip varieties. It was a casual way to end the conference which didn’t feel forced and allowed people to leave whenever they wanted, which was simply brilliant in my book. Pun intended.

The following were laid to rest with all due process, pomp, and circumstance on the 24th of March, 2010.:

–15 manuals for the TI-83 Graphing Calculator which we’ve had since 2005 and have had exactly 1 circulation, in 2008.
–15 manuals for the Nikon Coolpix L4 Digital camera, which we’ve had since 2006 and which is already available in pdf format online
–8 viewing station headphones which can’t be plugged in anymore due to the necessity of increased security at the viewing stations. (Don’t worry, Media Services is keeping the headphones to be used as the current viewing station headphones break down.)
–1 metal overhead projector from the 1980s. It’s had a “being repaired” status since 2006. And anyway we have a spiffy new “digital presenter” which offers more functions and is actually portable without causing hernias.
–1 mini-disc recorder. Back in the dark ages, known to historians as “the 1990s,” mini-discs were a hip, exciting new technology involving easily-broken spinning plastic discs, encased in more plastic to help deter breakage, that used proprietary technology and a highly lossy audio format incompatible with any other audio format before or since.
–1 microcassette transcriber. You know those things that used answering machine-sized cassettes (back when answering machines existed as discrete units plugged into your home telephone) and could be stopped and started with via a plugged-in foot pedal for easy dictation or interview playback for transcription? Yeah, one of those. It even circulated once in 2007.

We in Circulation Services realize it will be a wrench to lose these crucial technologies our customers have been clamoring for. But in these Hard Times, sacrifices must be made for the greater good. Thank you for your dedication to the cause.

20 minutes after starting the whole thing, it’s already over. That’s because our students, God love ‘em, are like piranha when it comes to Cookie Night. Earlier this evening at least half a dozen came up to ask me when the cookies were going to be wheeled out, so I think they’ve figured out our secret plan of having cookies on the Tuesday of exams. Mike Roy, Mary Backus and myself put the sugary goodness you all graciously provided in the lobby, and then stood back (far back) from the feeding frenzy. Mike captured the spectacle on one of Circ’s Flip cams, and we thought we’d share some of the footage. Many thanks to you all for providing our students with a needed break from papers and exams, just a few moments to relax, chat with each other, and enjoy one of Nature’s most perfect foods. And while I’ve been typing this 3 students stopped at the Circ Desk just to say thank you to LIS.