Submitted by Peter Liu, MIIS
As a part of ongoing process of integration into the Middlebury College Libraries, we’ll have a new MIIS Faculty Authors Collection debuting during the National Library Week: April 12 – 18. It’s the collection in development similar to the MIDD Faculty Authors practice. Here is the link to the MIIS Faculty Authors master list in PDF as of April 9, 2009:
http://sites.middlebury.edu/colemanlibrary/files/2009/04/facultyauthorslist.pdf
Submitted by Bob Cole, MIIS
The Teaching & Learning Collaborative in coordination with the Digital Media Commons at the Monterey Institute is training an army of podcasters. The one unit, fifteen hour workshop titled Digital Media for Change meets Friday afternoons from 2-4pm. Participants are exploring new communication skills with digital media with a particular focus on affecting change. We’re reading and discussing the workshop text by Garr Reynolds, PresentationZen, and we have gathered online on a homegrown social network hosted by Ning: http://dm4change.ning.com. Participants will be helping the Institute build our capacity to capture campus events, speakers, and other stories that distinguish our community and reflect our mission. We’re building an army of graduate students, staff, and faculty to help us! And yes, we like cupcakes.
As the workshop coordinator I am using this as an opportunity to experiment with alternative course management tools and blogging. We welcome any and all who might be interested in what we are up to, so please feel free to join us on our Ning, or grab the RSS feed for the Dm4change blog that is being piped into the main page for workshop updates and thoughts from yours truly.
Submitted by Bob Cole, MIIS
I have been personally experimenting with Twitter, the micro-blogging tool. After nearly a year, I’ve discovered there is immense value in personal and professional learning networks. I ‘follow’ edtech professionals, NPR news, teachers, and the humor of ICHCheezburger. With Twitter I am able to post 140 character ‘tweets’ of insight, listen to others, and crowdsource an idea or question. Now that I’ve nearly summited the Twitter adoption curve (see left), I’m evangelizing with students and colleagues here at MIIS. Trouble is it’s an uphill battle.
This, however, changed recently when a TLC colleague, Sarah Springer mentioned a new tool in a brief conversation. She said something about a crowdsourcing tool named Yammer. I didn’t write it down or Tweet about it, but it did stick in my mind. I 
went and checked it out online. Essentially, Yammer is an enterprise Twitter for in-house collaboration, and maybe a gateway tool for future Twitterers. We’ve slowly invited like-minded staffers, students, and faculty to join in on the sharing.
An added feature that Yammer offers is the ability to tag posts with hashmarks. So, it I share an event I could include the #event tag and my yammer msg would be added to that tag archive, very much like blogging categories or tags work as well. I can even follow a given tag in Yammer and receive a digest e-mail of activity.
I’ll continue to tap into my Twitter network as beohbe, but am excited by the possibilities that Yammering in-house learning and sharing will bring as we continue to experiment with communication and collaboration tools here in Monterey.
We’ve just added a new Search interface to our Google Search Appliance, this one for the Monterey Institute of International Studies. The frontend uses a custom stylesheet to get the GSA interface to look like the rest of the MIIS site, which updated its design last week. The web applications that Middlebury hosts for MIIS (the Directory and the Online Giving Form) were updated to this new design yesterday. We index content on the following MIIS sites:
http://www.miis.edu/
http://policy.miis.edu/
http://translate.miis.edu/
http://language.miis.edu/
http://fisher.miis.edu/
The “All” collection includes, well, all of those, while the last four have custom search collections that let you refine your query. I waited to make this post until we’d indexed enough content. We’ve got about 5000 pages indexed currently and I’m betting there will be more by tomorrow. Generally it takes a full day to reindex the content of an institution-level website like Middlebury’s or MIIS’s.
You can get directly to the MIIS search interface by going to this URL:
You can also have a form on your website that lets people search the MIIS site through the GSA. Here’s some basic HTML code that allows you to do this:
<form method=”GET” action=”http://search.middlebury.edu/search”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”site” value=”all” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”client” value=”miis_frontend” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”proxystylesheet” value=”miis_frontend” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”output” value=”xml_no_dtd” />
<input type=”text” name=”q” />
</form>
Submitted by Peter Liu, MIIS Library Director
For many years, the Institute’s more than 2,000 VHS video collection has not been included in the library’s Online Public Access Catalog or OPAC until recently. As a part of the MIIS and MIDD libraries’ integration process, a joint project of MIIS A/V collection enhancement to support instruction was launched during this summer. The primary purpose of the project is to convert the existing A/V Center VHS video data of Microsoft Excel into a set of the library MAchine Readable Cataloging records or often known as the MARC standards. The project intended to leverage Middlebury cataloging expertise, make a full use of the recent updated Millennium server’s capacities, preserve all useful data and present in a simple and web searchable format. After several months of hard work of librarians on both MIIS and MIDD campuses, especially through timely guidance and collaborations with Terry Simpkins and his talent cataloging staff at Middlebury, the MIIS library’s OPAC (http://monti.miis.edu) is now containing more than 2,000 VHS videocassettes from the A/V Center. As a result, MIIS faculty and students are now able to find, identify, select, and obtain A/V materials just like they search any printing books and periodicals. The project has greatly enhanced the usability of A/V collection on and beyond campus. A portion of the regularly purchased A/V materials of documentary videos, performances, performance art, and feature films will be adding into our library holdings on the largest union catalog of the OCLC’s WorldCat. Those A/V materials can be checked out at A/V Center for one day or 24 hours as usual. They will not be lent to other libraries except to Middlebury through interlibrary loan in the near future.
Copyright note:
The video cassettes and other A/V materials in the library are subject to the Revised Copyright Act of 1976, Title 17 of the U.S. Code, Sections 101-810, which took effect on January 1, 1978. The library prohibits the use of these materials in any way that violates Federal or State laws.
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