Submitted by Carrie Macfarlane

We have formed five new faculty advisory groups, one for each academic division, to provide advice and feedback to LIS and the existing campus-wide Faculty LIS Advisory Committee.  You can see a list of the five new groups on the LIS Advisory Groups blog.  Each group will be led by a LIS representative and a faculty representative, and will be convened 2-3 times per year to share information and requests.  Our hope is that these new groups will facilitate discussion on discipline-specific questions, helping us all to see where needs converge and diverge.

Topics for discussion in divisional meetings will be determined by the groups and their co-conveners.  Some topics that we expect might be of interest include updates on academic technology assessments; budgets; classrooms and labs; emerging tech support needs; trends in scholarly communication; collection management; web presence; and in-class research instruction.

We’re excited at the prospects for increased communication that these new advisory groups raise.  This is a pilot, though, and if it’s not as successful as we’d like then we’ll look for alternatives after two years.  If you have any suggestions for meeting topics, contact one of your representatives (find out who they are at the LIS Advisory Groups blog).