Tag Archives: Middlebury

New Delivery Options for NExpress and ILL: Armstrong Library Pick up.

We have made the Armstrong Science library an official pick up location for ILL and NExpress materials.  If you select Armstrong delivery, your requested materials will be automatically sent to the Armstrong Science Library for pick up when they arrive at Middlebury.

This is now possible for both NExpress and interlibrary loan materials.  However, selecting this option is done very differently in each system.

  • For NExpress the choice is made each time an item is ordered, through a drop-down menu.  Select Armstrong Science library from the list of available pick up locations.  go/NExpress
  • For ILLiad, the choice is made at registration.  In order for a current ILLiad user to change their preferred delivery location in ILLiad, you will need to update your contact Information in the Tools menu in ILLiad.  Click on “Edit My Contact Information” and select Armstrong Science Library as your “Delivery Site” to take advantage of this new service.  You can return to regular pick up at the Davis Family Library at any time by returning to ILLiad and changing your selected delivery site back to Davis Family Library.   go/ill

Please contact mdyill@middlebury.edu with any questions.

Summer in the Lab

The dog days of summer may have passed (we hope) but the heat is on, with just over two weeks of school left and symposium projects galore. Cubicles in the library are filled to capacity, and the Wilson Media Lab is no exception. With a full fleet of tutors, we are working hard to meet the digital media needs of students, staff, and faculty.

Here’s just a taste of what we’re working on.

  • Faculty course websites for the fall semester
  • GIS mapping of trees on campus
  • 3D environments for the psychology department
  • Digitization projects for archives, professors, and the library

In addition to our long-term projects, the lab is busy every day with walk-ins making projects for classes, presentations, or research.

In other lab news, we’ll soon be updating the software image on the Mac towers, which will include an operating system upgrade, among other things. With each passing year, we hope to keep the lab up-to-date on technological/educational developments and continue to support the Middlebury community’s forays into the latest in electronic possibilities.

We’ve also recently installed a new color printer, so please be aware that students seeking color printing can be directed to us whenever the need arises. We’re always happy to help them, and anyone else, with media-related questions.

~The Digital Media Tutors

Agenda for 20 May Manager’s Meeting

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)

Library Hours

clockAll Midd Libraries begin 9 – 5 hours today.

Library hours are reduced during the period between spring and summer semesters. Check here for hours.

PLEASE NOTE! The Libraries will close at 12 noon on Monday 5/24.

Special Collections will be closed Monday 5/24 through Friday 6/4; opening Saturday 6/5 from 10-2 for Reunion weekend, and resuming regular hours Monday 6/7.

Website Performance: Pressflow, Varnish, Oh-My!

Executive summary:

We’ve migrated from core Drupal-6 to Pressflow, a back-port of Drupal-7 performance features. Using Pressflow allows us to cache anonymous web-requests (about 77% of our traffic) for 5-minutes and return them right from memory. While this vastly improves the amount of traffic we can handle as well as the speed of anonymous page-loads it does mean that anonymous users may not see new versions of content for at most 5 minutes. Traffic for logged-in users will always continue to flow directly through to Drupal/Pressflow and will always be up-to-the-instant-fresh.

Read on for more details about what has change and where we are at with regard to website performance.

Continue reading →

MiddLab

http://go.middlebury.edu/middlab

MiddLab is a new section of Middlebury’s website with no precedent: an academic network, uniting all of the… blah, blah blah.

Truth is, MiddLab has been hard for us to explain ever since we heard the idea. A research network featuring discussions and blogs, and linking together disciplinary themes? How does that work? Rather than write a manifesto, here is what we’re trying to accomplish with MiddLab.

Our Goals

  • Make research easy to discover. If you want to know what student and faculty research is going on in a department, you shouldn’t have to know where their papers are published or the address of the project’s web site. Instead, these should be one or two clicks from our home page.
  • Show connections between research. Whether researching the population growth of trees in Biology or the population density of people in Geography, projects share themes and people interested in the topic can easily explore both.
  • Start a discussion. We encourage and recommend that you add comments to the projects on this site. Ask questions, suggest new research, or explain why you disagree with the conclusions. You can add your thoughts to any project page on MiddLab, explore the individual blogs for some projects, or contact the researchers directly.
  • Provide space for research and the sciences on our site. We’ll be expanding this site to feature more presentations from the Spring Research Symposium and research projects in our science departments. Though MiddLab is open to any student, faculty or staff projects, these are areas where we know we’re not offering enough information on our site and would like to use MiddLab to expand.

Your Feedback

We aren’t sure these are the right goals for our site. We’d like to hear from people: what would you like to see in MiddLab? What parts of this site work toward these goals and which don’t? Leave your thoughts by commenting on this page.

Oh, and if you would like us to feature your project in MiddLab, send an email to middlab@middlebury.edu.

LIS Staff Relocation Plan, May 6th

In the interest of sharing this much anticipated plan with everyone as soon as possible, below please see the LIS Staff Relocation Plan that LIS Administration approved this afternoon.   It’s a working document, not a formal one, so please excuse any name abbreviations or spelling errors.  It shows where LIS staff will be located on three floors of the Davis Family Library.   In the coming days we will work with Facilities Services to turn this plan into a move schedule and we will share that schedule widely as soon as possible.

As you know, we are undertaking these moves as soon as possible because the College needs us to vacate the 2nd floor of Voter Hall so that it can be turned into student housing before students arrive for the fall semester.

Thanks to everyone who worked with their managers to help draft the plan, and thanks especially to those who were given few, if any options because our options were generally very limited.   Having said that however, I believe that many of the location changes will be improvements in the long run.  Thanks for your continued patience and forbearance.   Stay tuned….   and here it is….

LIS Staff Relocation Plan May 6th