The format of the meeting eschewed the traditional speaker followed by a few questions in favour of a lightning round describing current projects at representated colleges, then brainstorming topics to be further discussed in a series of “break-out” sessions. The format felt more collaborative and productive than simply presenting information.   Discussions were deemed successful enough to warrant follow-up meetings.

Attendees from Middlebury: Wendy Shook, Rebekah Irwin, Bryan Carson.

Lynda’s recently added courses include such varied topics as “Managing Teams,” “Designing a Book,” and “Up and Running with Windows 8.” Watch a single video or work through an entire course, but be warned — it’s addictive.

Please note that we do continue to offer “by request” group training during the summer months, staff and classroom space permitting; kindly send your request with details to helpdesk@middlebury.edu.

Michele Reilly and Anita Dryden from the University of Houston discussed their approach to providing data management planning assistance to their research faculty.  Data management is not part of their mission; they focus on providing both general and UH resource specific information via their library web pages and by the creation of a data management planning (DMP) Tool.  This tool, created using drupal webforms, is similar to the California Digital Library’s DMPTool and the Digital Curation Centre’s DMPOnline. Although offering fewer features, the UH tool pre-dates the online tools mentioned, has been easy to maintain and customize, and has been sufficient to fulfill the needs of their researchers.

(1)    Upgrade the “Go” Web Application server, we expect less than a 10 minute interruption of service at approximately 7:00 am.

(2)    Upgrade Central Authentication Service (CAS), we do not expect a service impact, this activity will also take place at approximately 7:00 am.

Thanks for your patience as we strive to keep our systems operating optimally.

***
“Liaison Discussion Section” meetings address research and/or technology topics of interest to liaisons. They can be conversations, or presentations, or both. They take place most often on the 3rd week of the month, but in order to allow people who work different hours to attend, they’re sometimes scheduled for different days/times.

~13 minute video talk by a journalist showing how news organizations verify information posted by users on the web (tweets, photos, videos) using technology such as Google Earth, etc.

How to Read a Book

Did you find an odd box with pieces of paper inside? It might be a book! Some of them still have real pages—and I’ll show you just how to read one.

The Business Value of Google Glass and Wearable Computing – Wearable computing is an emerging technology that’s affecting both the consumer and enterprise space.

Predatory Publishers Strike Back
Predatory publishing is what happens when open access publishing is subverted by manipulation, exploitation, and spammer mentality. Jeffery Beall is a librarian who uses his blog to expose predatory publishers, and they would rather he didn’t. Beall has written a Nature column piece  about predatory publishing, and his blog is Scholarly Open Access.

As LIS plans to improve and expand wireless coverage to meet these demands, we are seeking help from the community.  If you are aware of a particular area where the wireless service seems consistently sub-optimal, please use this form (Login required) to report it to us.  (Note: if you experience problems with wireless access in multiple buildings, please see the LIS Wireless Troubleshooting page.)

This new form is not a substitute for the Help Desk; you should continue to report specific problems to them.  We may not personally respond to every problem reported via this form, but we will definitely use this information, in conjunction with other tools, to identify under-served areas of the campus as we plan improvements in our wireless services.

a busy lab

Students fill the Wilson Media Lab in the Davis Family Library, completing media projects for the end of the semester. A good number of students in this picture are finishing up posters for their theses.

The Language School task force joined us to discuss their proposal for providing curricular technology support for this summer’s Language School programs. The team asked the ADs to review and approve various proposals, including:
Update curricular platforms documentation

• Minor changes to current documentation will be made as needed;
• Documentation that needs more extensive updating will be marked to alert users;
• CTT will periodically review and revise documentation tagged as being in need of updating;
• Joe A. will look into options for “tagging” [4/27 update - he has identified a couple of appropriate tags to use for this];
• An annual documentation review should be planned; this may be something the Curr Tech Team can assume ongoing responsibility for.

Curricular technology questions, unscheduled

• Joy has met with Mills coordinators and walked them through Moodle and the CourseHub.  Mills coordinators can now “masquerade” as other users to help troubleshoot issues themselves;
• Joe A. has met with Joe D., Linda and Marty to introduce them to the CourseHub and Moodle platforms.
• Vacations may need to be staggered to ensure continuous coverage, especially during the July 4 holiday;
• ADs will ask their managers to balance vacations schedules within their groups.

Curricular technology questions, scheduled.

• The ADs would like to discuss this in a small group setting with support providers;
• Support for this, like most of the other LS tasks, will need to be revisited next year.

Onboarding Workshops for faculty/staff.

• We are hoping support can come from the Ed and Training Team.  Mary will communicate with them about this;
• Bryan will provide a list of skills has has covered in the past when doing this training.

Courseware Workshops for faculty/staff.

• We would like LS bilinguals to shadow LIS staff this year as LIS staff conduct workshops.  We will discuss this idea with coordinators and directors.

Curricular resource site creation

• Bilinguals and faculty who use curricular technology frequently will be asked to place request for site creation needs in advance to allow LIS to assess demands.  At this point, there is no guarantee LIS can fill every request.  Time spent performing this work may limit time available for other, equally important tasks;
• Joe A. is meeting with LS coordinators next Wednesday.  He will set a deadline for LS departments to communicate needs/requests;
• Joe A. noted that a temporary and fairly straightforward means for site creation would be to use our pilot implementation of SANSpace.  The down side to this would be if decided not to move SANSpace into production; we would then need to find another platform suitable for these sites;
• Joe A. will also find out from the coordinators when the bilinguals will be arriving.

Conversations with the team will be continued through email to make sure the appropriate conversations are taking place.

Thanks for reading
Terry & Doreen

An interesting visual representation of 105 of the most common metadata standards.  The chart breaks the standards into four areas:

• domain (i.e., most common field(s) of use)
• community (libraries, museums, publishing industry, etc.)
• function (e.g. controlled vocabulary vs. markup standard)
• purpose (resource description, preservation metadata, rights, technical, etc.)

The accompanying glossary provides a good, basic description of each standard/acronym.

Riley, Jenn. “Seeing Standards: A Visualization of the Metadata Universe,” May 6, 2013. http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/~jenlrile/metadatamap/