Author Archives: Carrie Macfarlane

Meetings of Divisional Advisory Groups for the Library are on hold indefinitely while we try to determine the best way to gather input from faculty and share news.

Faculty choose which topics will be discussed at their meetings. A list of potential topics for this fall’s meetings is below. We invite faculty to request topics not on the list too. We hope that most if not all of the groups will meet before the end of November.

All groups will discuss:

• Curricular technology support [Joe A] – CTLR and LIS have been asked by the academic administration to explore ways in which the support for curricular technology and digital scholarship can be integrated into the overall work of faculty development within the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research. The CTLR-LIS Task Force on Academic Technologies plans to spend the fall looking internally at our current practices, and also exploring how other schools have approached this. The group would like to hear feedback from faculty.

All groups may choose additional agenda items from this list (or offer other suggestions):

1. Wireless [Billy Sneed] – Faculty, please let us know what you’d like to hear about. Some ideas to consider: Stats on usage, advice on how to request better coverage, description of recent upgrades and future plans.
2. Potential reduction in number of computer labs and/or  computers in each lab [Mary Backus] – We want to look at usage patterns, and also at alternative ways of providing access to software and computational resources. One goal is to make sure that we aren’t overspending on computer labs in an era when more students are doing their work on their own laptops. We need to understand the possible impacts on the curriculum of these potential shifts.
3. Analog Sunset [Petar] – (Some groups already discussed this last year.) Goodbye VHS, goodbye LaserDisc, hello digital video recording and more. We can provide updates and answer questions.
4. Citation and Style Guide for students [Carrie] – This fall, we revamped our Citation and Style Guide for students. We now provide more examples on how to cite sources, and more advice on when and why to cite. We also removed a lot of extraneous information. The guide can be used on its own, or as a supplement to the new Academic Honesty Tutorial. We’d like to hear your feedback. You can take a look in advance: http://go.middlebury.edu/citation.
5. Time to resolve computer issues [Mary Backus] – We have moved to a new incident tracking system called Web Help Desk. You can now submit incident tickets through the web, check on the status and history of your technology issues, and access a knowledgebase of known issues and troubleshooting steps to resolve common issues. We hope you find this new service allows us to resolve your technology issues more quickly, and allows you to keep track of the status of your technology requests more conveniently. We would like to hear your feedback.
6. Data management [Wendy] – Wendy will bring us up to date on the status of science data management, data management planning, and a pilot data repository in the making. Questions and comments welcome.
7. Videoconferencing [Petar] – The College has set a goal to strongly support academic departments to venture into videoconferencing. We will provide updates, and we would like to hear your thoughts. Are there any problems right now with videoconferencing on campus? How might you use videoconferencing?
8. Online registration [Dave Ludwig — and we would hope to include staff from the Registrar’s Office too] – Historically, the course registration process has experienced numerous and repetitive problems. Since 2011, much work has been done to improve the Banner system as a whole, but also the registration process specifically. We would like to determine how much our efforts have resulted in a noticeable improvement, and whether (to the extent that faculty may be aware) there is still frustration with poor performance issues.