Tag Archives: priorities

March 2014 LIS Update

spring-flowers

We’ve posted the March 2014 Update from LIS.

As has become our custom, we write this update three times a year to provide ourselves and  rest of the community with a review of recent accomplishments, and more importantly, a roadmap for what to expect in the next three to six months. In addition, we make a nod to what we see as future issues and challenges further down the road.

Highlights since the last LIS Update include:

  • We continued to co-sponsor with CTLR the Academic Roundtable to encourage cross-campus conversation on important topics having to do with pedagogy, scholarly inquiry, and student learning.

  • We also continued our planning for the digital liberal arts initiative.

  • We continued to build out new library subject guides

  • In Special Collections, we supported students and faculty during Winter Term including A People’s History of Middlebury and Field House Museum, Adventure Writing, Space and Place in the Graphic Novel, and Matt Longman’s seminar on higher education.

  • We started to archive Ward Prize-winning student essay in our online archive

  • We made more progress in building out our new videoconferencing infrastructure and upgraded a number of classroom.

  • We continued to encourage our community to use Web Help Desk to request service from us.

  • We created a new guide to training options that include both on-line, off-site, and on campus options.

Key goals for the next three to six months include:

 

  • As part of the broader faculty governance conversations taking place on campus, we in turn are thinking about a wide range of governance questions. How do we ensure appropriate consultation with our students, faculty, and staff to ensure that our planning and prioritization is aligned with the needs of the community that we serve?

  • We are hiring! We are currently running searches for a director of academic technology, a senior systems administrator, a head of collections, a media services specialist, and a network security analyst.

  • We are discussing the technical and policy implications of converting our google apps from a pilot to a full-supported production system.

  • We will also be discussing the process for evaluating new options for our email/calendaring system, and updating our analysis of the privacy and security implications of moving certain services to the cloud.

  • We are busy planning for the move of the CSNS and Security work groups to Exchange Street, the move of the Enterprise Applications area to Painter House, and the re-use of space within the Davis Family Library to support the digital liberal arts initiative.

  • We are planning an upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft Exchange.

  • We’ll be rolling out a Network Access Control system that will allow us to more carefully control which devices can join our network.

  • We’ll be reconfiguring the wireless network to make it simpler and more secure. As part of that, we’ll be putting in place a guest registration system to allow for those who only need to use it on a temporary basis.

  • We will be working closely with many offices across campus to develop a multi-year plan for Nolij, the document imaging system that allows for offices to automate many of their paper-based processes.

  • We’ll be upgrading Drupal, the software that powers our website to the latest version.

  • We’re also working with the Office of Communications on rolling out a new design for the homepage and some of the key pages that are linked to from the home page.

  • We will have an external security review of our systems as part of a consortial effort to improve our security stance.

  • We will continue our efforts to study trends in the ways our public computer labs are used to help us plan for the future of providing computing resources to our students.

  • We will start a pilot project where you can check out a bicycle from the circulation desk.

  • We’re writing a Request for Proposal as part of our investigation into a new campus phone system.

While we pursue all of this, we will of course keep doing all of our regular stuff: prepping for Language Schools, upgrading classroom and lab technology, adding more wireless access points, updating various systems, teaching information literacy courses, buying and cataloging library materials, and distributing new computers.

One goal that we are very keen to pursue is to invent a fool-proof, indestructible stapler that no one can steal.

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions on any of this, please feel free to contact me (Mike Roy, mdroy@middlebury.edu) or do so on-line at https://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2014/03/27/march-lis-update/  .

— mike

LIS Fall 2013 Update

update

 

The LIS-Update-Fall-2013 from LIS is now available for your reading pleasure.

This update from LIS covers work accomplished this summer and early fall, and projects out into work we will be doing in the later fall and early winter. For those not familiar with this report, it is designed both to capture the contributions that LIS has made in its efforts to support the information and technology needs of the College, and also to ensure that those who work within LIS and those who work closely with LIS are aware of current priorities and initiatives. Because of its goal to provide useful, detailed information for those of us deeply involved in this work, it is a long and somewhat technical document.

For those who may not have the interest or patience to work their way through the over twenty pages within this report, here are some highlights:

  • We’ve recently revised our strategic directions for LIS, and defined a set of overlapping issues that will help us in our efforts to evolve to meet the evolving needs of the College, and the fast-moving world of technology and information services. We are looking at how we support innovation, new models for access to resources, our approach to sourcing various core technologies, how we can support efforts to improve administrative efficiency, and ways to define quality and reliability in the face of growing demand on our resources. You can learn more about this at http://www.middlebury.edu/offices/technology/lis/about/strategic_directions_and_goals

  • We have been working closely with our colleagues at MIIS and with the new DC office to establish a new videconferencing system that significantly improves the quality and reliability of this service.

  • We’ve installed a new system called web help desk that provides our users with the ability to create and track their own tickets, makes the assignment of tickets to workgroups far more efficient, and provides easy access to solutions to common problems.

  • We migrated the last reports from our AS400 data system (the system that Banner replaced) and shut down that system forever.

  • In response to the growth in demand for ubiquitous and robust wireless services across campus, we added access points to locations on campus where there was not adequate service.

  • This fall we have been engaged in a planning effort with our colleagues from the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research to establish new ways that we can work together to support faculty development in curricular technology, and to develop a plan for work in the digital liberal arts.

This list is just a sample of our many recently completed projects, and our current priorities. I invite you to read through the complete list. If you have any questions about any of this, feel free to contact me.

— mike

PS The graphic is from the Google Books Ngram Viewer, and shows the history of the use of the word Update over the last 500 years.

 

LIS Update: August 2013

IndiaRajandEmpirequote

 

I’ve just posted the LIS Update August 2013 that describes recent accomplishments, current priorities, and longer-range opportunities and challenges. It is a lengthy, detailed document that captures the many things we are doing to help support the College’s efforts. A broader, higher-level description of our goals for the year and beyond can be found at our recently updated Strategic Directions page and at our Goals for 2013-14 site. I hope it is useful as a way to stay informed about what we are working on. If you have any questions about any of these items, do feel free to reach out to the appropriate group within LIS or to me.

 

LIS Quarterly Update: April 2013

wordle-april-quarterlyreportI just posted the latest installment of the Quarterly Update from LIS. This installment covers activity from December 2012 through March 2013, and describes recent accomplishments, our current priorities (for the next 3-6 months) and longer range opportunities and challenges that we are preparing for. The 14 workgroups and  teams that comprise LIS each contributed on average a little more than five items in each of the three categories. This adds up to a total of 233 items, broken down into 72 items recently accomplished, 95 items that are current priorities, and 66 items in the future-oriented category. As always, we hope that this report provides useful insight into the work that we are engaged in. We welcome feedback on any and all items included in this report.

As I read through this, I think of the LIS mission statement “We bring knowledge to you. We help you explore, use, and contribute to it as you engage the world”, and how the many, many activities we are engaged in are all part of our overall effort to evolve our resources and services to adapt to a changing information and technology environment, an evolving curriculum, and a community with an increasing appetite for all things digital. I am also struck by how these seemingly disparate activities all do in fact connect with one another through our mission, and through our mission to the broader mission of the College.

 

December LIS Quarterly Update

We’ve just posted the LIS Quarterly Update for your reading pleasure. We’ve shrunk it down (it’s a mere 11 pages!) and generally re-organized it to make it easier to skim quickly. As always, I would love to hear more about how we can make this report useful as a communication and planning tool, and also what we can do to make the process of producing it as simple as possible.

LIS Quarterly Update: January 2012

Welcome to 2012! As part of my ongoing effort to keep LIS and the College community aware of and involved in the work of LIS, I’ve decided to start writing a quarterly report. The report will offer highlights from the last three months, and describe our upcoming priorities, longer-term issues we should begin to consider, and other institutional planning efforts with which we must connect. Given the constraints of our budget and staffing, it is clear that we need to understand our priorities, make hard choices, and focus our efforts on the areas and initiatives that will make the most difference. Continue reading

LIS Focus: Spring 2011

Below you will find the Spring 2011 edition of the LIS Focus document that outlines the activities that we’ll be focusing on this spring. For this quarter’s installment,  I’ve organized the document into a more traditional format that lays out the areas of focus for each of the workgroups and teams within LIS.

In addition to this quarterly snapshot of what’s keeping us busy, we still have our goals and our projects that provide another view into the on-the-ground view of what we are doing to achieve our longer-term vision for how LIS can support the ambitious goals of the College. The idea behind these quarterly snapshots is to provide a check-in to make sure that our annual and multi-year initiatives are making steady progress week-by-week, and to provide a transparency into what our priorities are. Continue reading

LIS Priorities: Fall 2010

In order to ensure that LIS and the community we serve have a shared understanding of our priorities, we regularly publish a summary of what we are focusing on. The intent is not to capture everything that we are doing, but rather to highlight what we see as the most important projects, issues, and initiatives. We’ve organized it into four categories.

  1. Evaluations highlight pilot projects and other ways that we are exploring new ways of delivering service
  2. Services, infrastructure, programs highlight those projects that will have the most obvious and direct impact on the community.
  3. Strategic planning highlight efforts that are longer-term and more abstract.
  4. Organizational development and assessment highlights activities that look at our organizational structure, workflow, communications, and efforts to assess and improve them.

This is the third installment of this document; previous installments can be found here: Spring 2010 and Summer 2010. Items new to the list are marked as new while items that have been removed from list are listed as such at the bottom of the document, as are items that we believe might make their way to the list in the future.

Continue reading