Innovative Users Group – a conference report

Categories: LIS Staff Interest

The annual Innovative Users Group conference was held in San Francisco April 23-26. Three from Middlebury attended. Here are some of the highlights from my perspective. More

Welcome David Wright

Categories: LIS Staff Interest

Please welcome David Wright to LIS. David will be joining LIS as a Media Services Temp, working with us from 4/30/13 to 7/22/13.
David comes with a good deal of audio recording experience which he gained from Full Sail University, and while working in NYC for three years as an Audio Engineer. He also worked with the Hilton and the Basin Harbor Club on event setups, including audio and video. David DJs in his free time.

David will start off with a desk behind Circulation and move into LIB202A soon.

Friday Links – April 26, 2013

Categories: LIS Staff Interest

How Grading Software Fails Students
CNN, April 14, 2013
Professor Jay Parini describes the difference between a person and a computer when it comes to grading papers.

British Documents from the past in China – trial through May 14

Categories: LIS Staff Interest

Until May 14, we have access to three Chinese history collections:

China: Culture and Society Screen Shot 2013-04-23 at 4.32.11 PM
Spanning three centuries (1750-1929), this resource makes available rare pamphlets from Cornell University Library’s Charles W. Wason Collection on East Asia. In addition, China: Culture and Society features a host of secondary resources, including scholarly essays, an interactive chronology, mini guides, and editors’ choices from the collection.

China: Trade, Politics and Culture 1793-1980
This digital collection offers English-language sources relating to China and the West, 1793-1980, including: papers of key individuals involved in the Chinese Maritime Customs service; papers of missionaries active in all regions of China; fully searchable run of the Chinese Recorder, 1867-1941, and more.

Foreign Office Files for China, 1919-1980
The complete British Foreign Office files dealing with China, Hong Kong and Taiwan during these decades of 1919-1980. The documents cover politics, industry, trade and cultural affairs and include eyewitness accounts, weekly and monthly summaries, and economic assessments and synopses on leading Chinese personalities.

 

Email eaccess-admin@middlebury.edu or your liaison with comments please.

 

 

Sunday morning network maintenance

Categories: LIS Staff Interest

This Sunday morning during our maintenance window of 6 am until 10 am we will be upgrading a number of network switches that provide connectivity to buildings throughout the Middlebury campus.  There will be about a 15 minute interruption of network access as each network switch is upgraded.

The affected locations are:

220 College St

30 College St

70 Hillcrest

75 Franklin

Arabic House

Athletics

Atwater

Battell

BiHall (this building will be completed before 7:30 am)

Bowker Barn

Centeno

Chateau

Chellis

Coffin

Cousteau

Deanery

DKE

Earhart

FIC

Gifford

Hepburn

Kelly-Lang

Kitchel

McKinley House

Mill

Milliken-Hadley

Monroe

Painter

Palmer

Pearsons

Portuguese House

Public Safety (this building will be completed before 7:30 am)

Shannon St

Starr

Stewart

Sunderland

Voter

Wright

Youngman Field

 

Friday Links – April 19, 2013

Categories: LIS Staff Interest, Middlebury Community Interest

Meet the First Digital Generation. Now Get Ready to Play by Their Rules.  By Jerry Adler, via Wired Magazine.  I found this to be a fascinating description of “the roughly 4 million Americans born in 1993.”  Adler notes that “Each generation imagines itself as rebellious and iconoclastic. But none before has felt as free to call bullshit on conventional wisdom, backed by a trillion pages of information on the web and with the power of the Internet to broadcast their opinions.”  If you do read it, stick it out for the happy ending!

A to Z maps – on trial until June 15th

Categories: LIS Staff Interest

A to Z maps online provides 100,000s of royalty-free, downloadable maps for academic and non-commercial use.

Screen Shot 2013-04-16 at 2.45.29 PM

  • USGS data
  • GIS files
  • Historic and antique maps
  • Geological and topographic maps
  • CIA maps
  • Political maps across time (e.g. Africa with changing borders throughout the 20th century)
  • Multiple and unusual projections
  • Hurricane maps
  • Volcano maps
  • Flags of the world
  • Tree and bird distribution maps
  • Educational maps and games (crossword puzzles!)
  • and more…

We have free access until June 15th. Let us know what you think – email eaccess-admin@middlebury.edu or your liaison.

Kurogo Higher Ed User Conference

Categories: LIS Staff Interest

I recently attended Modo Labs’ Kurogo Higher Ed User Conference hosted at UMASS Amherst where I was able to meet and speak with Modo Labs staff as well as Kurogo users from other institutions. Kurogo powers our mobile web presence and desktop portal.

2013-04-02 15.50.00

Modo Labs’ current offerings, Mobile Campus, and Kurogo, are being renamed as follows:

Mobile Campus -> Kurogo Campus Professional
Kurogo -> Kurogo Campus Community
and -> Kurogo Core

The latest version of Kurogo Campus Community, 1.8, was announced and released during the conference. The 1.8 version includes a number of new enhancements already present in Kurogo Campus Professional. Highlights include a desktop interface similar to our desktop portal view, as well as a lot of behind the scenes enhancements like better theming and config handling.

Modo Labs laid out a road map of Kurogo including the following information:

- Community Edition 1.8 out today!
- 1.9 (mostly updates for the Campus Professional version) 2013 late Q2
– Improved admin panel/self admin
– New templates
- 2.0 Q3 2013 for both Community and Professional versions.
– Revamped frontend based on UX widgets
– Data Retrieval via JSON, RSS, SOAP, which is attached to the widget, which is then attached to the module.
– JQuery bundled in project.
– Able to include an individual screen/page as a native app.

I attended the developer track session in the afternoon where we went over the creation of a custom module, in this case, to pull questions from Stack Overflow. The custom module included the creation of 4 main classes: Module, Model, Retriever, and Parser. This session helped me to better understand the current module structure.

I look forward to continuing to support our instances of Kurogo as the platform grows and develops.