Please note: having started out swimmingly by posting manager’s notes soon after our the November 2011 meeting where we promised to routinely post notes — mea culpa — I promptly forgot to add this to my list of weekly tasks. So, following this will be posts containing notes through our April 2012 meeting, at which point I’ll be caught up and can be more timely with this in the future. Thanks for your tolerance. Continue reading
On Tuesday May 31st we’re going to change the categories on this blog, so if by any chance you’re using a feed of a specific category, that’s going to break. We suggest subscribing to the whole blog for maximum enjoyment! If you’re not a LIS staff member & would like to filter out the more staff related posts, you can subscribe to the new “Middlebury Community Interest” category after May 31st. The other categories will be “LIS Staff Interest”, and “Post for MiddPoints” which will cause the post to be added to the MiddPoints blog too. All the old categories except “The Essentials” will be converted to tags for easy searching.
The LIS Web team developed this new scheme, following recommendations that came out of the open meeting about the future of the LIS Blog (including a call for simplified categories). The AD Team reviewed and approved these changes. We welcome your comments.
We had a manager’s meeting this month. Here’s what we discussed:
1. Goal Setting Process
Mary Backus led a discussion on the goal setting process for LIS. Her presentation is available at http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dg3d3j83_10ck44mfgj . Milestones for the process are: Area and Team Goals due at end of July. Workgroup goals due at end of August. Individual goals reworked to fit into this new framework at end of September. Area and workgroup goals to be vetted by FLAC and SLAC in time for budget development process.
2. LIS Focus Document
Mike Roy shared a draft of the LIS Focus document that is revised on a quarterly basis. The document is open for comments on the LIS Blog at https://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2010/07/14/updated-lis-focus-document-draft/ .
1. Discuss assessment pilot projects (see https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYZPHKugPdOiZGNzdDV0aDNfMjVnNnpma2ZmMg&hl=en )
2. Discuss annual planning calendar (see https://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2010/05/19/annual-planning-calendar/ )
3. Brainstorm ideas for how to orient new staff members to LIS (we’ll post the list of ideas to the blog after the meeting)
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!)
— mike