Morgan and Kate

Cowboy meets Warrior Princess

Arabella

Our Custodial Staff

Prom Queen – JoAnn

Little Red Riding Hood – Kristin

Submitted by Elin Waagen

The popular LIS Yellow Cable Program (borrow a cable; put one back) is on the threatened species list. Please return any yellow cables you see floating around work and public spaces to the Circulation Desks at any of the Libraries.
Pictured here is the famous Yellow Cable Hero in full action! Many thanks to Amy Hoffman for picking up cables on her daily walks around the Main Library.

After many months, the new library eco book bags have arrived! We hope to roll them out next week after finalizing a few details. The idea is to replace the use of plastic bags at the Circulation Desks, and to foster re-use of recyclable bags. Borrowers can take a bag when they borrow books and return an empty bag when they return their books.

Bags were funded primarily by an Environmental Council Grant in partnership with LIS.

Last spring we held a contest to solicit design ideas and the winning design was selected in a blind judging by LIS Administration.

Nikhil Ramburn (pictured here holding the new bag) was selected as our winner. He will receive a book bag and a $100 gift certificate to the College Bookstore. Congratulations, Nikhil!

Many thanks to the Environmental Council, Jack Byrne, Carol Peddie and Mary Backus for their support of this project, and to Alyson Bourne ’08 and Emily Gustavson ’08 for their help in writing the grant during their busy senior year.

Do you have a fun web tool that you are using for work or play?
Interested in sharing it with others in LIS?
Want to present? Presentations are casual and short – no lengthy preparation required.
Just want to share an idea that we can present for you?
If so, contact Elin or Bryan.

Previous topics have included:
Jott
ChaCha
RTM – Remember The Milk
GrandCentral
Facebook – birthdays
GoodReads
Del.icio.us

Future topics:
Twitter
FeedDemon
CommonCraft
GoogleReader
iGoogle

Save the date and time!
The next Tasty Web Tidbits lunchtime session is scheduled for Thursday 11/6 at 12 noon in Lib 105. The idea is to get together, have some fun and share the web tools we are using. Presentations are about 10 minutes long max. Each session has 3 – 4 presenters with time for spur of the moment sharing. There is a prize drawing at each session. Attendance at all sessions increases the chance to win the grand prize in December.
Bring you own bag lunch.
Come – it will be fun!

We are currently setting up electronic services with our principal vendor of German-language materials, Harrassowitz, from whom we also purchase musical scores. When all is finished, we will enjoy a streamlined ordering and invoicing process, much like that provided by Blackwell, our major English-language vendor. Liaisons will be able to select items to be ordered in OttoEditions, the online bibliographic utility named for the venerated Otto Harrassowitz, who founded the firm in 1872. We purchase various categories of items from Harrassowitz, for each of which we have set up a separate account and profile. Items to be ordered in each category are assembled in a file in OttoEditions, which we import into our library system. The files of brief bibliographic records contain data added by Harrassowitz, in accordance with our specifications, which after processing through our load table causes order records to be automatically created, and encumbers the cost of each item. This eliminates the need to search for and download a bibliographic record, and create an order record, for each item individually. The ordering process is completed when we confirm our intent to purchase by electronically transmitting the order records back to Harrassowitz. We have successfully tested the procedure up to this point. Our colleagues in Cataloging are now making arrangements with OCLC, which will in conjunction with Harrassowitz furnish final bibliographic records (with embedded data that will cause our system to automatically create online invoices) for our purchases through the Cataloging Partners program. Once this second stage is completed, we will be able to implement the entire procedure.

Fall term additions to Multimedia Resources include:
A dozen new events in the lecture archive including two faculty panels on the economic crisis and the 2008 Clifford Symposium;
Copyright resources from Pacific Film Archive;
Other lecture archive sites: FORA-TV, Georgetown University Webcasts, and Stanford Humanities Center.

One of the lecture archive sites in Multimedia Resources, Connie Martin Talks Books, offers an unexpected look at a younger Barack Obama. The full interview is available, but here’s a clip (edited with Virtual Cutter): Obama interview 1995.

Have you noticed the new bulletin boards outside the stairwell near the Help Desk? These will soon be the home of a new LIS Suggestions Board.

Here’s the plan:

1. We’ll create a sign for the new Suggestions Board.
2. People will be invited leave comments on the board or online at the Suggestions Blog (shortcut: go/lissuggestions). Most suggestions that are received on the Suggestions Board will be transcribed to the Suggestions Blog, and vice-versa.
3. Responses will be tracked on the Suggestions Blog. Be ready! We’ll forward each suggestion to someone who has a stake in the issue. Those people should then go to the blog and respond.
4. When a resolution has been posted to the blog, we’ll post the answer on the board. We’ll probably develop some stock answers for repeated questions. (Too hot? Too cold? Right!)
5. If we don’t receive any suggestions at all, or if the board overflows with suggestions, or if anything else happens that we haven’t anticipated…we’ll reassess and figure out what to do next!

One more thing: All comments that we received on the post-it poster last spring have been re-entered on the blog as individual postings. We’ll soon forward those to the people who can respond. Watch your inbox! And, tell us what you think about these ideas, too.

Here are some of the projects and tasks that DAS staff members have been working on during the past month…

Mike Schuster
- Modifications to a Banner custom process for the Registrar’s office that creates student class codes to meet new business rules.
- Modifications to the “LS Stats- new” Hyperion report to display applications for students applying to language schools at Mills College.
- Assisting with applying the Banner financial aid SSB upgrade in the DEV2 database.
- Investigating issues with Banner custom database triggers that create “away” and “returning” general student records for students going on leave.

Rob Pekor
- Modifications to the Phone-a-thon data interface for College Advancement.
- Gathering requirements for the data feed for the Harris online community project.
- Refinement of the Banner/ListManager (Broadcast Email tool) integration model with Travis.
- Loading MIIS gift history for Monterey and College Advancement.

Travis Stafford
- Refinement of the Banner/ListManager (Broadcast Email tool) integration model with Rob.
- Transitioning the Alumni office and CSO towards use of the self-service WordPress cformsII plug-in for all “new” non-eCommerce forms.
- Clean-up of code and adding functionality to Project Tracker.

Liz Whitaker-Freitas
- Ongoing work related to the Hyperion System 9 Upgrade/Migration (one line item, but this is a BIG project).

Ian McBride
- Completed development on a News Dashboard for College Communications (http://web.middlebury.edu/systems/newsboard). This will soon replace the main Public Affairs News home page and aggregate news content from several sources.
- Supporting CMS content providers and other web-related requests.
- Participating in the Web Makeover team meetings.

Chris Norris
- Migrated GO.middlebury.edu to a more stable prod environment, implemented GO.miis.edu for Monterey.
- Refinement of service-level monitoring, including addition of escalation groups.
- Project Phoenix BIA reviews, planning, specification for remote DR web presence.
- Pre-migration configuration, testing, troubleshooting of eCommerce web forms.
- Supporting ListManager newsletters, conducting ListManager workshops (only a couple more to go!).
- Contacting various folks about outstanding FileMakerPro requests, pre-migration web forms questions.
- Working on updated SWOT analysis of the DAS workgroup.

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.