Author Archives: Michael Roy

Orientation for New LIS Staff

Here’s a rough list of ideas that we developed at a recent meeting to figure out how we can systematically make sure that all of our new LIS staff members are provided with opportunities to learn about LIS and the College.

Revive the new employee handbook–> Carol thinks she might have a copy of this somewhere.
Find a moment for each new staff member to review the recently launched strategic planning website
Invite new staff members to already regularly scheduled staff meetings for the various work areas in order to provide them some insight into what the various work areas do –> we would need a good list of such meetings and when they occur to make this happen
create a somewhat informal mentoring program that gives new LISers a person to turn to for questions –>we need to identify someone to make this happen
make sure that all new staff member get to meet everyone in their area on their first day of work, and everyone in LIS within the first month of work (see also increased social activities)
have a monthly or bi-monthly lunch/coffee to introduce new people and provide a chance for new people to ask questions/learn
find out more about what happens at the HR orientation to avoid duplication
share the HR checklist for supervisors of new employees and develop our own checklist (based on this) that supplements that checklist
consider developing an internal to LIS facebook-like thingy that would allow everyone in LIS to share information about themselves with new staff members (their job duties, their work histories, their photos, and if willing, their personal interests/hobbies)
increase the number of all-LIS social activities in order to encourage interaction across work groups
encourage work groups to host open houses for their areas to educate others about what they do
use all-LIS staff meetings to repeatedly introduce new folks, and vice versa, think of creative ways to allow new folks to meet the rest of us
provide new hires with a list of 10 people that they really should meet in their first 100 days of employ

Please feel free to make further suggestions using the comments below. It isn’t clear that there will be time or energy or interest to do all of these things. For now we just want to continue to brainstorm ideas.

Agenda for 20 May Manager’s Meeting

Annual Planning Calendar

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The AD team has constructed an annual calendar that we are using to help make sure that we stay on top of our regularly occurring activities around planning, budgeting, assessing, and communicating. We thought that it would be useful to share that calendar with the rest of LIS in order for everyone to be ‘singing from the same song sheet’.

That calendar can be found at http://bit.ly/bD3JFu .

Feel free to add comments below to suggest other items we might want to add to our calendar.

NITLE Camp 2010

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This came in today from NITLE; for those who are still planning out their professional development plans, this might be of interest.

— mike

I invite you to take a look at the Camp schedule and consider how you might use these offerings to advance your campus’s mission. At this year’s NITLE Summit we tackled the theme “Advancing towards Liberal Arts 3.0” on a strategic level, considering the impact of changes in the technological and information environment on the curriculum, scholarly research, support infrastructure, and liberal education generally. NITLE Camp 2010 is about the skills, practices, information, and relationships that members of your faculty and professional staff need to support the sorts of strategic moves discussed at the Summit. Sending your innovative faculty members and front-line technologists, librarians, and other staff members to Camp can help you promote innovation on campus.

Let me highlight Camp events that follow up on Summit sessions:

The Multimedia Track lays out practical steps for advancing “Media Fluency” as described by Gardner Campbell.
The Assessment Track follows up on the “Assessing the Impact of Information Literacies and Technologies on Learning” session and will further the efforts of an assessment working group in the NITLE community. Robert Gonyea of NSSE will also be delivering the Camp keynote address.
The Mobile Track fleshes out the theme of mobile technologies in Bryan Alexander’s opening keynote.

The Digital Scholarship Track includes an Open Access workshop, following up on Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s keynote address on “The Future of Scholarly Publishing.” It also features an XML & TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) workshop to teach one practical application of the Digital Humanities.

General and updated information about Camp is available on the NITLE Camp Blog, including

Schedule Overview
How to Register (early registration ends May 21)
Costs and Packages
Lodging & Travel

NITLE Camp 2010 runs June 21-24 at DePauw University. Participants can sign up for as much or as little as they choose. To help keep costs down for participants, NITLE has secured low-cost, on-campus housing ($35/night, includes breakfast); kept the cost for the community meetings on June 22 to $25 (for food); and set multiday package pricing at a discount.

We hope that you and others from your campus can join us. Please feel free to contact Rebecca Davis at rdavis@nitle.org or 512.863.1734 for more information.

May all-LIS staff meeting agenda

The Library Has a Name: The Davis Family Library

Google Apps for Education Evaluation Underway

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Middlebury is evaluating Google Apps for Education as a possible replacement for Microsoft Exchange as its platform for email and calendaring. We’ve set up a website about this evaluation process that includes a summary of the process and the key questions we are asking. We will host an open session on this evaluation in early May in order to ensure that there are opportunities for the entire community to learn more about Google Apps for Education, to understand the evaluation process, and to provide input and feedback. The website is Google Apps @ Middlebury Project. You can ask questions and make comments via this site, or feel free to contact Michael Roy (mdroy@middlebury.edu) .

Notes from the March Manager’s Meeting

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We had a manager’s meeting this month and talked about the following items:

1. Communications: We had a lengthy discussion about how we communicate within LIS, and continue to debate the relative merits of creating a private blog just for LIS, of re-introducing an email version of LISt, and in general the challenges of keeping people up-to-date about what’s going on within LIS, both so that we have the information we need to do our work, and so that we can know what conversations and decisions are on the horizon in order to have a chance to have input in advance. We’ll discuss further at an upcoming staff meeting before we make any changes. (Feel free to weigh in here via comments or via email if you have thoughts on this.)

2. Project Directory: We looked at the project directory and committed to getting the data updated in time for an April launch.

3. Priorities: We discussed a draft of a document entitled “LIS Priorities: Spring 2010 and beyond” which I created to help communicate the major projects and activities that we are focused on right now. That document lives at http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhb56n4x_129f9pmqt7g . The hope is that by publishing such a list quarterly that we as an organization can all know what the top priorities are. (We are still working on figuring out a reasonable process for actually establishing these priorities in consultation with the rest of the Middlebury community. More on that later!)