Tags » Area Directors

Present:  Mary Backus, Mike Roy, Terry Simpkins, Carol Peddie, Chris Norris, Doreen Bernier; Wendy Shook (guest)

Wendy Shook joined us to discuss the draft Data Management Policy she is in the process of preparing.  This is a requirement for grant applications from certain agencies (e.g. National Science Foundation); applications for funding from these agencies require the inclusion of a data management, access, and preservation plan.

The completed policy will outline objectives for science data preservation and storage using a digital on-campus repository, or, where appropriate, pointing researchers to national discipline-specific repositories that may be preferable.  Currently, Biology, Economics, and Psychology are departments at Middlebury that are most likely to need local data hosting/preservation.

Wendy suggested a 2-stage process.  Stage 1 would be a pilot project using ContentDM in conjunction with a subscription to a digital object identifier (DOI) registry. Stage 2 would reassess the platform and determine if migration to another platform would be beneficial.

We agreed that Wendy should investigate costs to subscribe to a DOI registry, and that we should get an estimate that includes MIIS.  There are also unresolved issues around data ownership and rights management, which Mike will try to have added to the Dean’s meeting agenda for next week.  Finally, Chris recommended that an information security audit and disaster recovery assessment be conducted for ContentDM.

The AD Retreat scheduled for April 19th be cancelled since Mike and Carol are both out.

We reviewed the LIS calendar for April, focusing on:

• the 3rd quarter budget: including travel, labor, capital and operational expenses.  Carol reported we are fairly well on target, budget-wise, with not a lot of wiggle room for unanticipated expenses;
• student labor trends.  We have asked workgroup leaders to review student labor trends to see how we are using student dollars; Directors should follow up and nudge managers as necessary;
• BreadLoaf/Language School planning –Carrie Macfarlane is leading a group preparing a report on support for this coming summer.  She expects to be able to submit it to Terry by Monday (4/8), and we will invite her and other group members to attend next week’s Directors’ meeting to discuss.

The Manager’s meeting agenda for the April 11th meeting will include:

• Follow-up discussion on management training, especially thinking about ways to keep the training moving forward and in active use;
• Professional development — Mike would like to try a pilot program where, for 1-2 Fridays/month, we will set aside time to make staff professional development a priority.  This would mean not scheduling meetings, limiting the amount of email we send to one another in LIS, etc., during this time.

The All-staff meeting agenda for the April 17th meeting:

• Staff awards;
• Norm Cushman will give an update on his organization (not confirmed);

The Optional all-staff meeting agenda for April 18th:

• BreadLoaf and Language School Planning (not confirmed).

Carol will re-engage the Space Team to review office space requirements for new staff members.

Mike would like to re-establish the LIS New Staff Member Coffee meetings for the forthcoming plethora of new employees.

The April 11 directors’ meeting is canceled.  We hope to discuss a proposal for LIS Language School support at the 4/18 meeting.

Thanks for reading,
Terry & Doreen.

Present:  Mike Roy, Carol Peddie, Terry Simpkins, Chris Norris,  Mary Backus and Doreen Bernier

The Area Directors provide Mike with weekly updates of activities happening within each areas.  Mike asked that, when the directors are out of the office on business travel or vacation, they either delegate someone on their staff to forward updates for posting to Doreen or provide the updates for the missed week upon their return.  He also asked the ADs to highlight topics that may warrant special attention by members of the College administration, or that demand more comprehensive discussion among the leadership team.

All areas appear to be roughly on schedule for the performance reviews.

Mike has been asking managers how long it takes them to prepare submissions for the quarterly update document.  Times estimates run between 20 minutes and 1 ½ hours, depending on level of detail.  Mike feels this process is working well.

The ADs discussed what the nascent Green Mountain Higher Education Consortium (which includes Saint Michaels College, Champlain College and Middlebury) may mean for our purchasing activities.  The Consortium is intended to look for ways to improve college services and find cost savings by acting together in making purchases in supplies, equipment and services.  At the moment, it is focused primarily on general supplies, but may look to broaden in the future.  The discussion focused mainly around what aspects of LIS purchasing might appropriately be considered for inclusion within any agreement between the 3 schools, and which aspects might be specialized for Middlebury’s needs and require a certain level of continued autonomy.

The update and demo of Web Helpdesk on this week’s agenda will be moved to next week.

Thanks for reading.

Terry & Doreen

Present:  Mike Roy, Terry Simpkins, Chris Norris, Mary Backus, Doreen Bernier

Bill Burger, Vice President for Communications joined us for part of the meeting to introduce himself to the directors.  Each of us described the organizational structure of our area and our team’s responsibilities.  General discussion centered around areas where both LIS and Communications overlap, such as the college website, copyright and events requiring media assistance.

The rest of the meeting was dedicated to addressing the recent security event affecting the campus email system.

Agenda for Jan. 31

• Curricular Tech Team visits (10:00)  – to be rescheduled
• LIS stats (Mike)
• policy summit review/next steps
• finalize 2013 APS timeline

Thanks for reading
Terry & Doreen

Present:  Chris Norris, Terry Simpkins, Carol Peddie, Mary Backus, Mike Roy and Doreen Bernier

As part of our disaster recovery planning efforts, Chris has been interviewing functional areas across campus  to inventory work processes and discuss  contingency planning efforts in the event critical system are not available.  Chris indicated that he may need assistance with this interview process from the ADs.  Once the interviews are done and the data is gathered and stored, the functional areas will be expected to update and maintain their own information on a yearly basis.

On Friday, the ADs will be holding a retreat to discuss budget planning.  A short discussion was held outlining the afternoon’s agenda.

Mike will invite Bill Burger, the new Vice President for Communications to next week’s AD meeting to meet the group.

We talked about some of the MISO Survey results and what our next steps might be to make improvements to our services.  Some suggestions are to:

• Additional data gathering re: public printers on campus, video conferencing and helpdesk.
• Look at the Liaison Program and see how it ties into current and future assessment pieces.
• Make  “wireless” a priority project to help make improvements across campus.  Increase WAPs in residence halls and change out those that are problematic.

We discussed ways to encourage more staff award nominations.  Terry will join the R&R crew as sponsor.  We also briefly discussed ideas for the upcoming in-service day to be held during March break.  Perhaps a security theme, but we can’t tell you about it (just kidding!)…

February’s optional All LIS Staff meeting will be about project prioritization.

We talked about keeping the “Outage & Alerts” page up-to-date on the LIS site.  Mary reminded us that any LIS blog post relating to downtimes, outages, etc., tagged with “Helpdesk Alert” will automatically feed the Outage & Alerts page as well.

Thanks for reading
Terry & Doreen

Present:  Mike Roy, Chris Norris, Carol Peddie, Mary Backus, Terry Simpkins and Doreen Bernier

Mike provided a summary of his CLIR-CIO meeting in Washington DC.  Some of the topics discussed were:

• MISO survey
• Digital scholarship
• On-line education
• Classroom design
• Quiet zones in the library
• Security
• Organizational structure
• Collection development issues

The Dec. 20th optional all-LIS staff meeting has been canceled.  Happy holidays

Chris led a discussion about next steps regarding our policy review (aka, Policy Summit). We looked at some of Gartner’s recommendations for policy management. After reviewing notes from the Policy Summit meeting and survey results, the following topics stood out:

• Data ownership, privacy, classification
• Education and awareness
• Technology enablers (ie. tools)
• Governance and enforcement

A consolidated list of next steps was generated:

• Inventory all LIS policies and policies that affect LIS
  • What do we have? What’s missing? What’s no longer needed?
  • Where are the policies? When were they last updated? Who is responsible for each policy?
  • Does the policy work? Would it work if it was enforced? How to deal with exceptions?
  • Is it an LIS policy or a College policy (or other, such as a guideline, practice, or procedure)?

• Determine institutional temperature of policy
  • Who should be leading this effort? Who should be involved?
  • Relationship to the data classification taskforce work?
  • What should the priorities be (i.e., currency, legal)?
  • What is the institutional philosophy around policies (e.g., comprehensive, prescribed? simple, broadly worded?

Chris reported that the final draft of the Data Classification Policy (created by the Data Classification Taskforce) has been completed. A review of this draft will be added to next week’s AD agenda for further discussion.

Chris has contacted Donna McDurfee, who sends out yearly update notifications on handbook policies, to request a spreadsheet containing an inventory of the current policies as a starting point.

Discussion touched the issue of which policies (vs., for example, guidelines or procedures) to prioritize.  There was at least some sentiment to focus on policies with an element of enforcement to them (as opposed to, for example, something like the library gift policy that mainly provides guidance to staff as well as donors).

A second round of Policy Summit discussions will continue during the January Optional All-Staff meeting on January 17th.

The ADs discussed whether the LIS Strategic Directions need to be updated.  It has been several years since the last revision. Sentiment varied as to whether we have the time, and whether it is worth the effort, to engage in this now.

Thanks for reading,
Terry & Doreen