The Language School task force joined us to discuss their proposal for providing curricular technology support for this summer’s Language School programs. The team asked the ADs to review and approve various proposals, including:
Update curricular platforms documentation

• Minor changes to current documentation will be made as needed;
• Documentation that needs more extensive updating will be marked to alert users;
• CTT will periodically review and revise documentation tagged as being in need of updating;
• Joe A. will look into options for “tagging” [4/27 update - he has identified a couple of appropriate tags to use for this];
• An annual documentation review should be planned; this may be something the Curr Tech Team can assume ongoing responsibility for.

Curricular technology questions, unscheduled

• Joy has met with Mills coordinators and walked them through Moodle and the CourseHub.  Mills coordinators can now “masquerade” as other users to help troubleshoot issues themselves;
• Joe A. has met with Joe D., Linda and Marty to introduce them to the CourseHub and Moodle platforms.
• Vacations may need to be staggered to ensure continuous coverage, especially during the July 4 holiday;
• ADs will ask their managers to balance vacations schedules within their groups.

Curricular technology questions, scheduled.

• The ADs would like to discuss this in a small group setting with support providers;
• Support for this, like most of the other LS tasks, will need to be revisited next year.

Onboarding Workshops for faculty/staff.

• We are hoping support can come from the Ed and Training Team.  Mary will communicate with them about this;
• Bryan will provide a list of skills has has covered in the past when doing this training.

Courseware Workshops for faculty/staff.

• We would like LS bilinguals to shadow LIS staff this year as LIS staff conduct workshops.  We will discuss this idea with coordinators and directors.

Curricular resource site creation

• Bilinguals and faculty who use curricular technology frequently will be asked to place request for site creation needs in advance to allow LIS to assess demands.  At this point, there is no guarantee LIS can fill every request.  Time spent performing this work may limit time available for other, equally important tasks;
• Joe A. is meeting with LS coordinators next Wednesday.  He will set a deadline for LS departments to communicate needs/requests;
• Joe A. noted that a temporary and fairly straightforward means for site creation would be to use our pilot implementation of SANSpace.  The down side to this would be if decided not to move SANSpace into production; we would then need to find another platform suitable for these sites;
• Joe A. will also find out from the coordinators when the bilinguals will be arriving.

Conversations with the team will be continued through email to make sure the appropriate conversations are taking place.

Thanks for reading
Terry & Doreen

• Find useful tips on the LIS pages (go/lis), (go/lib), and (go/helpdesk)
• Use (go/subjectguides) for links to databases, CDs, video and more
• Begin your research, searching for articles across both databases and MIDCAT (the library catalog) with Summon.
• The music collection has moved into the Davis Family Library, link here to view a map depicting the updated location of materials.
• Study Carrel Suites have been set aside for use by specific Language Schools; individual carrels within the Language Suites are available on a first come, first served basis and may not be reserved; the Language Suites are intended for the exclusive use of the language specified. MAP
• If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to Ask a Librarian.

Tuesday, May 31-Thursday, June 2      By Appointment Only

Friday, June 3                                           Open 1-5 p.m.  for Reunion Weekend

Saturday, June 4                                      Open 10 a.m.-2 p.m. for Reunion Weekend

June 5-19                                                  CLOSED

Monday, June 20-Friday, August19     By Appointment Only

Monday, August 22-Friday, September 2    CLOSED

CLOSED WEEKENDS DURING THE SUMMER

Most of the content in WordPress sites are Posts, chronologically ordered entries that make up a ‘blog’ or news site. Pages on the other hand, are non-time-dependent content that can be arranged in a hierarchy. Traditionally, Pages in WordPress sites were used mostly for describing the blog, contact information, or other content that rarely changes and isn’t ‘newsworthy’. (more on Posts vs. Pages)

Recently, a number of sites have been making increasingly large use of Pages, such as to hold curricular resources that are then referenced from Posts describing assignments that use them. For sites that make significant use of Pages, site-owners can now enable the RSS Includes Pages plugin so that new pages are added to your site’s main feed. For course sites in WordPress, enabling this plugin will allow page additions to be fed into the Course Hub as updates.

We still recommend making use of Posts in WordPress sites to share new material with readers rather than heavily using Pages as Pages are still second-class citizens in many ways (such as support for tagging and categorization). With the new RSS Includes Pages plugin, Page-heavy sites can now feed new content to the Course Hub and others subscribed to their feeds.

Already have a performer or band in mind? You can also search in Midcat using the name of the performer or band. (Check out this other video on using MIDCAT to find music CDs in foreign languages.)

If we don’t own it, try NExpress or ask us to order it. We welcome your suggestions.

Don’t see your favorite band or musician in MIDCAT (go/midcat)? Try searching the NExpress catalog (go/nexpress). If you still can’t find what you need, place an online purchase request using our Music Request form (go/musicrequest).

Visit the Language subject guides (go/subsplus), select your language, and go to Tips on the right hand side of the page to find preset searches for foreign language music and videos. (Check out this other video for another approach to finding music CDs in foreign languages.)

Need more help? Ask a Librarian! (go/askus)

The Identity Management (IDM) project seeks to organize our concept of a “person” or “identity” among our various systems (including Banner, the Active Directory, web-applications, hosted systems, and others). This project focuses on three facets of each identity:

Unique identifier:

Every identity would have a unique identifier. Currently, only people in Banner have one of its identifiers (guests and vendor-staff aren’t in Banner) and only people in AD have log-in names (alumni, parents, and others aren’t in the AD).

Unified Properties:

Each identity will have a set of properties (name, email, address, title, department, etc) that is consistent and available to all of our applications. Currently user properties may be different or unavailable depending on which source of user information is used; a person’s title is a good example of this inconsistency.

Roles:

Identities will gain zero or more “roles” that can be used to grant or deny access to our systems and services. We currently have no consistent way (in AD or web applications) of determining if a person is a current student, faculty, staff, or other role — the best we can do now is to look at membership in certain mailing lists like “All_Faculty”. With the IDM project, we will be able to access an authoritative list of the current roles for a person (visitors would have no roles) and will be able to ensure that access to services properly matches an individual’s relationship to the college.

In addition to organizing and improving the properties and roles of our current set of users (current students, faculty, staff, emeriti, vendors, spouses, and limited guests), the IDM project will also enable us to expand the number of usable (authenticate-able) accounts to include alumni, prospective students, and visitors. As well, we gain the potential to include users from other institutions via federated authentication systems such as Shibboleth.

Here is a list of a few things that will become possible with completion of the IDM project:

• Rather than accounts being immediately deleted upon graduation, they instead would loose the “student” role and gain the “alumnus” role. These users would continue to use their same log-in credentials access alumni-only and public resources (i.e. commenting on blogs, renewing library books), but would loose access to student-only resources (i.e. course websites, JStore and other subscription library materials).
• We will be able to grant access (individually or in groups) to many of our online systems for guests, alumni, emeriti, visitors, vendors, perspectives, and others with loose affiliations with the college.
• Inter-institutional projects will be able to make use of any of our online systems as collaboration platforms.
• A fan of Middlebury Hockey could create a visitor account to use for purchasing panther gear from the college book store, then come back and log in with the same account to purchase tickets from the box office, make comments on the coach’s blog, and fill out a form to sign up their kids for participation in the Winter Carnival ice show. Their name, email, mailing address, and other properties would be available to all of the systems.

Please note that some of these examples will require additional changes and development projects beyond the IDM project itself. However, all require aspects of the IDM project to be possible.