Last Saturday, the Middlebury Board of Trustees approved a project to relocate the Music Library from the Mahaney Center for the Arts (MCFA) into the Davis Family Library, moving the History of Art and Architecture Department into the vacated music library space. This project is scheduled to begin next June, with completion hopefully by September.
Telephone Services recently installed a new voice over IP telephone system at the Middlebury College Snow Bowl. It is an Aastra MX-One Lite telephony server which integrates fully to the main campus Aastra (Ericsson) phone system. Next time you need to call the Bowl just dial SNOW (7669).
Our local contractor, Business Telephone Systems, working with our telephone system vendor, Black Box Network Services, installed the new server and phones in late September. We are using the existing campus fiber network that was connected to the Bowl in the spring of 2009. Howie McCausland and I tested the voice quality over the fiber with the vendor this past August. Our network passed the test with flying colors.
The Snow Bowl now has a combination of IP phones in the offices and analog lines elsewhere. The two major requirements for the new system were that it had enough analog trunk lines to accommodate the telephones at the lift load and unload stations and that the system not need dedicated bandwidth on the fiber. A POE switch was installed to keep the IP phones going during a power outage, and in the event of a network outage the phones will failover to one of the four telephone company analog trunks remaining.
Thank you to everyone who was able to attend either of my discussion meetings for MiddLab last week! There were a lot of great ideas for the site and upcoming projects. You can now see one of those ideas added to the site in the new Research Centers page which shows a map of all the MiddLab projects. We’re going to continue adding features to the site throughout the semester, so stay tuned.
While we were not able to record the sessions due to some technical difficulties, I have prepared a guide to adding your project to MiddLab. Feel free to edit that page to add your own tips on creating a successful project description or send an email to middlab@middlebury.edu if anything is unclear. I will host another meeting to discuss MiddLab during the Spring semester, for those who were not able to attend, but I’m also more than happy to meet individually with Faculty, Staff, Students, departments, and offices.
During a discussion with Bob Cluss and Colleen Converse, we came up with an idea for a sub-site in MiddLab that serves as a portal to discover publicly available academic publications from our faculty and students. I’ll be working on adding that this semester and welcome you to send documents or (preferably) links to these papers in public databases to middlab@middlebury.edu. If the document is larger than 10MB, please send it to website@middlebury.edu instead. If you already have a site that lists these documents that you’d like to be included, you can also just send that link and I’ll take care of the rest.
Look for this information to be added to MiddLab shortly, giving people both on and off-campus another easy way to find information on the active and ongoing research at Middlebury.
I also want to make you aware of a small change in policy about the inclusion of content in MiddLab. Due to some concerns about the unfortunate rules surrounding some academic publication and to ensure that all research collaborators are willing to be included, we’ll now ask that every person involved in a research project agrees to have it hosted in MiddLab before it is put up. I can also remove content from the site where your name appears if you would not like it published in this manner. You can see any mention of your work in MiddLab by browsing the People page. Please address any concerns to middlab@middlebury.edu.
We will be hosting two sessions next week to help answer this question. One session will focus on how MiddLab can be used alongside faculty and student research projects and another on how MiddLab can work with offices on campus related to research events. You are welcome to attend either and there is a lot of overlap between these topics.
We hope to see you there! As always, if you have any questions about MiddLab, or would like to add your work to the growing list of projects, let us know by sending an email to middlab@middlebury.edu. More information is available on the About MiddLab site, or in anarticle in this week’s issue of The Campus.
We’ve added a new content type to Drupal that can display a MiddLab project in your site’s sidebar. To use this, edit your sidebar page and click Add in the Edit Console, thene select “MiddLab Widget” from the list of content types. You’ll then see a list of checkboxes with MiddLab themes, departments, and offices. Check the boxes that are appropriate to your area and save the new node.
The result will look something like this:
This is a neat, and very easy, way to highlight student, faculty, and staff work that takes place in your department or is sponsored by your office. If your department or office doesn’t have any projects in MiddLab right now and you’d like us to add some, we’d love to hear from you. Again, just email middlab@middlebury.edu.
Ian McEwan, the acclaimed English novelist, will read from his new work in Mead Chapel on Tuesday evening, September 7th,at 7:30 p.m.
McEwan is widely admired throughout the world as a writer of substance. He won the prestigious Booker Prize for AMSTERDAM, and many of his novels, including ATONEMENT, ENDURING LOVE, THE CEMENT GARDEN, and THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS, have been made into major films.
“No one writing in the English language surpasses Ian McEwan,” The Washington Post.
In collaboration with Vergennes boat builder Douglas Brooks, Special Collections is offering a new short-term exhibit The Two Pointers of Dead Creek : A Tradition of Trapping and Boat Building in Addison County. Assistant Curator Danielle Rougeau is working with Douglas Brooks on mounting the exhibit on the Lower Level of the Davis Family Library. The exhibit officially opens on Wednesday, September 1, 2010, and will be on view through Friday, October 1.
During the 2009-2010 academic year, Brooks and three Middlebury College students, Renee Igo ’11, Christian Woodard ’11 and Ben Meader ‘10.5, interviewed trappers and their descendants in an effort to document the culture of muskrat trapping in Addison County, with an emphasis on the “two pointers”, the double-ended boats that trappers built.
After a training program with the Vermont Folklife Center, the researchers began recording interviews and examining historic boats. Over twenty historic trapping boats were identified in the region. Eventually several boats were carefully measured and one was chosen for replication. The students displayed an historic boat at the 2010 Middlebury College Student Research Symposium.
In the 2010 spring semester, Igo, Woodard, and Meader, guided by Brooks, built this trapping boat in studio space at Middlebury’s Old Stone Mill. The boat was launched on Commencement day, May 27, 2010.
We have just introduced a new course schedule planning tool to help students discover courses and arrange selections of them that avoid timing conflicts.
When browsing the online catalog at go/catalog you can now log in and save courses that you find interesting. Look for “Save” links to the top-right of course descriptions. Courses can be saved either from the search view or from the detail views linked-to from department course listings.
This screen-cast gives an overview of the Schedule-Planner and how to use it:
Notable features:
Please note that this tool is designed as a planning and advising aid — it does not register you for classes. Also, it does not have access to individual student records and hence does not check that prerequisites have been met.
Try it out at go/catalog.
With the merger of Collection Management and portions of Academic Consulting Services, it became clear that the area needed a new name to reflect its expanded scope.
I’m therefore pleased to announce that the name for this area is now Research and Collection Services (RCS). While many portions of the website still reflect the old names — and it will take a while before we’ve eradicated all remnants of Collection Management/Academic Consulting Services from the website, email distribution lists, HR/Banner information, etc. — please consider the name to be effective immediately. We’ll try to get the changes made expeditiously.
As a reminder, RCS includes: