The Ski-Minded College: Winter Carnival 1950

This clip from a recently rediscovered College promotional film produced in 1950 shows how students at “one of the most ski-minded of American colleges” took advantage of all that a Vermont winter has to offer. The dulcet narration guides us through a tour of the Snow Bowl and introduces us to the Winter Carnival, “the highlight of the year, [in which] fine competitive skiing is combined with the tops in social events.” The clip also captures student broadcasters just a few months after the founding of WMCRS, the college radio station that has gone by the call letters WRMC since 1952.

Be sure to join Special Collections on February 26 during the Winter Carnival in Crossroads Cafe as we present a special screening of newly-discovered films from the college archives (follow us on Facebook or check the Carnival schedule for an exact time). Spanning the 1920s to 1950s, this assortment of sound and silent footage captures the full range of Middlebury’s historic wintertime fun— from synchronized skiing to cigarette pack snow sculptures!

 

Sources

“College Stations Changes Name.” The Middlebury Campus, October 9, 1952.

Lemcke, Ted, “WRMC Elects New Board; Plans to Enlarge Schedule” The Middlebury Campus, May 16, 1957.

 

The Ski-Minded College: Winter Carnival 1950

This clip from a recently rediscovered College promotional film produced in 1950 shows how students at “one of the most ski-minded of American colleges” took advantage of all that a Vermont winter has to offer. The dulcet narration guides us through a tour of the Snow Bowl and introduces us to the Winter Carnival, “the highlight of the year, [in which] fine competitive skiing is combined with the tops in social events.” The clip also captures student broadcasters just a few months after the founding of WMCRS, the college radio station that has gone by the call letters WRMC since 1952.

Be sure to join Special Collections on February 26 during the Winter Carnival in Crossroads Cafe as we present a special screening of newly-discovered films from the college archives (follow us on Facebook or check the Carnival schedule for an exact time). Spanning the 1920s to 1950s, this assortment of sound and silent footage captures the full range of Middlebury’s historic wintertime fun— from synchronized skiing to cigarette pack snow sculptures!

 

Sources

“College Stations Changes Name.” The Middlebury Campus, October 9, 1952.

Lemcke, Ted, “WRMC Elects New Board; Plans to Enlarge Schedule” The Middlebury Campus, May 16, 1957.

 

Flow has a new name

Attention, researchers: If you used Summon or another library database to save citations to a Flow account, please be aware that Flow is now called RefWorks 3. It also has new tools and capabilities. If you were a Flow user, simply log in to the new RefWorks with your Flow username and password in order to access, add to and manage your citations.

You may log in to the new RefWorks by using this link (RefWorks 3 login) or by clicking on the “RefWorks Log In” link at the top of the results page in Summon:

RefWorks login in Summon

We will update library guides for RefWorks 3 and Flow soon. For now, please visit RefWorks 3 Help for additional documentation.

Researchers who have been using legacy RefWorks should continue to use it. Be aware that clicking on “RefWorks” links in Summon will bring you to a page that invites you to create an account with RefWorks 3, and RefWorks 3 will not automatically contain your citations from legacy RefWorks. We will share more advice as it becomes available.

Protect Your Privacy

Information Security has a New Twitter feed and other new content on their website. Follow us at #MiddInfosec or visit our website at http://go.middlebury.edu/infosec

You and your information are everywhere. When you’re online you leave a trail of “digital exhaust” in the form of cookies, GPS data, social network posts, and e-mail exchanges, among others. It is critical to learn how to protect yourself and guard your privacy. Your identity and even your bank account could be at risk!

  • Use long and complex passwords or passphrases. These are often the first line of defense in protecting an online account. The length and complexity of your passwords can provide an extra level of protection for your personal information.
  • Take care what you share. Periodically check the privacy settings for your social networking apps to ensure that they are set to share only what you want, with whom you intend. Be very careful about putting personal information online. What goes on the Internet¬¬ usually stays on the Internet.
  • Go stealth when browsing. Your browser can store quite a bit of information about your online activities, including cookies, cached pages, and history. To ensure the privacy of personal information online, limit access by going “incognito” and using the browser’s private mode.
  • Using Wi-Fi? If only public Wi-Fi is available, restrict your activity to simple searches (no banking!) or use a VPN (virtual private network). The latter provides an encrypted tunnel between you and the sites you visit.
  • Should you trust that app? Only use apps from reputable sources. Check out reviews from users or other trusted sources before downloading anything that is unfamiliar.

Weekly Web Updates – January 25, 2016

Updates

Fixes and Tweaks

  • Corrected an issue in MediaWiki where new users were unable to log in and edit due to an error saving information to the users table in the database.
  • Syllabus pages on the Course Hub that don’t have any syllabus on them will now issue a “404 Not Found” header to the browser, but won’t redirect the user to the central 404 page. This is being done so that search engines know that there’s no content on the page and won’t return it in search results.
  • Fixed an issue with cascading permissions in Drupal’s Monster Menus that would sometimes cause queries to the database to get backed up and slow down the site.
  • Our script to create new wikis in MediaWiki now works with version 1.26.
  • We removed NER digital and Behind the Byline from the list of categories that are excluded on the New England Review site’s posts list.
  • Fixed an issue where creating sufficiently large CSS in WordPress using the Jetpack plugin’s “Edit CSS” module would cause the CSS editor to fail.

Update: Snow Bowl phone system restored

Telephone service at the Snow Bowl was restored last evening, 1/19/16.    802-443-SNOW (7669)

The Snow Bowl telephone system is out of service until some parts can be replaced – either later this afternoon or tomorrow, January 20.  If you need to contact them by phone in the mean time, the back up telephone number is 388-2871.

Weekly Web Updates – January 18, 2016

Change to Instructor Course Listings

Instructor course lists in the Course Catalog and Drupal profiles merge equivalent courses so that cross-listed courses don’t show up multiple times in the list when they are really the same thing, but under a different code. Unfortunately, the logic we were using conflicted with the way data is entered in Banner to prevent students from registering for different courses that overlap significantly in their content area.

We’ve now updated the logic to merge the results based on the “cross-listing of course-sections” instead of the “equivalence of courses”. This should reduce the number of mis-merged courses shown in instructor profiles. That said, because we are using the data in a new way, it is possible that we will expose errors in the data that will need to be cleaned up. If you are an instructor and see an error in the course list in your profile, please submit a Helpdesk Ticket and we’ll investigate.

More details for those who are interested:

The old process was:

  1. Find sections taught by the instructor in the time-frame (default is past 4 years).
  2. For each section, get its associated course.
  3. For each course look up equivalents in SCR_EQUIV and merge them into a single result.

The new process is:

  1. Find sections taught by the instructor in the time-frame (default is past 4 years).
  2. For each section get the cross-listed sections from SSB_XLST.
  3. For each section plus its cross-listed sections, get their course entries and merge them into a single result.

Updates

Tweaks and Fixes

  • The “MiddTags” shown at the bottom of Basic Content nodes in the Middlebury Drupal site are now displayed using Drupal’s built-in field API, allowing their display and label to be altered on sub-themes. Currently, there should be no noticeable difference in how they are displayed.
  • Similarly, the “card” view of Profiles on the Middlebury Drupal site is now using Drupal’s built-in view mode system to display them as “teasers”. This allows us to prevent some code from running when they are displayed this way, most importantly preventing the lookup of course listings, which are not shown in the “card” view. As a result, the lists of profiles will load faster when you are logged into the site (the caching system means they already load quickly and there will not be a noticeable effect on their load time when not logged in).
  • We have also made performance improvements to the Course Catalog, lazy-loading data that is not needed on the initial page load, such as course descriptions, to improve the load time of search results.
  • MediaWiki 1.26 changed the order in which some files are included on the page and we have updated the CategorySuggest plugin so that it is now working again.
  • Facebook embeds in our Drupal sites now include the height attribute in the element, ensuring that the browser renders the embed at the correct height while the page is loading. This also means that when the left sidebar in the Middlebury site corrects its height to set the address block at the bottom of the column, it will take into account any Facebook embeds.
  • The Health Professions Committee form was updated to include a link for submitters to view their submissions, so that they could edit and resubmit certain entries.
  • We have removed the Twenty Eleven Midd, Midd Classifieds, BLOGS DOT MIDDLEBURY Landscape, BLOGS DOT MIDDLEBURY Map, BLOGS DOT MIDDLEBURY Translucense, Flexible BLOGS DOT MIDDLEBURY Navy, 2010 Translucence, and 2010 Translucence Parent (2.0)) WordPress themes.
  • The WordPress configuration on the MIIS WordPress site has been updated to prevent a redirection loop that could occur when accessing a site dashboard.