This Week in LIS - 11 April 2008

Submitted by bartch02 on April 11, 2008 - 4:10pm
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Upcoming Dates

  • April 14-19: National Library Week (and Book Sale)
  • April 16,17 (Wednesday, Thursday): Training: KATIE (New Version Sneak Peek and Gradebook)
  • April 17 (Thursday): Demonstration: Norse Apps
  • April 23 (Wednesday): Demonstation: Moving to the Mac Platform
  • April 24 (Thursday): Training: Word 2007 & Office 2007
  • April 30, May 1 (Wednesday, Thursday): Training: Excel 2007 & Office 2007
  • May 7 (Wednesday): LIS General
  • More information on upcoming training opportunities: http://lis.luther.edu/learn

Headline of the Week: Faculty Computer Replacement Kicks in Gear

With summer just around the corner (on the calendar at least), the time is quickly coming for LIS to launch our computer replacement process for faculty. This year will see some changes to how we handle this process from previous years that we hope will even out workflows, provide better overall management of Luther’s workstation inventory, and allow a larger number of computers to be refreshed more rapidly in the past. Here are a couple key points covering our “faculty roll” process moving forward:

  • Our replacement cycle for faculty will be standardized with that for other employees at four years. Faculty had been replaced every three. After extensive discussions with faculty and others at Luther, we believe a four year cycle is manageable for most needs and maximizes our hardware investments.
  • We will move to a staggered replacement cycle for faculty machines. In the past all faculty machines were replaced in the same summer. This made for a very large project and less opportunity for LIS to work as individually with faculty or departments. By staggering the replacement cycle over four years, we hope to regularize the replacement process workflow, reduce big gluts of similar computers purchased by Luther, and be able to provide better individual and departmental service. We plan to launch this process this summer with some departments waiting to replace their machines until next summer, in effect beginning a four-year cycle. A full schedule of hardware replacement for faculty will be published by LIS later this spring.

Next week, LIS will meet with departmental administrative assistants to brief them on our data collection process (now online) for faculty. We are also working on our final budget for this summer’s project for review by the Board of Regents next month.

LIS Blog Highlights from the Week

The following articles are sampled from those available on the LIS Blog:

LIS Website Changes

  • No major new news to report on the LIS website this week.

Notes from LIS Council

LIS Council did not meet this week.

NITLE Opportunities

In an effort to make our NITLE opportunities a little more marketable and accessible, the full list has been posted separately to the web at http://lis.luther.edu/nitle. The list will be updated every two weeks or so as new information is made available by NITLE. TWILIS will only carry new or updated items each week. Hopefully that is a little easier to read and manage, and we’ll save a few bits and bytes here and there …

The following opportunities are new or updated:

Cool Resource of the Week: NASA Science

NASA has recently launched a new science portal containing a goodly amount of information designed to appeal to wide audiences interested in the earth, heliophysics, the planets, and astrophysics. Published by the Science Mission Directorate of NASA, the site offers faceted collections of information on different topics, and for different audiences including researchers, educators, kids, and citizen scientists. Links to other NASA content are available from the site as well. On the web at http://nasascience.nasa.gov/

Around the Web

Here are a few links to interesting developments over the past week:

  • Service and User Experience
    • None
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