This Week in LIS - 12 September 2008

Submitted by bartch02 on September 12, 2008 - 4:01pm

Headline of the Week: A Dashboard is Born

If you close your eyes and imagine yourself driving a favorite car down the highway (or if you’re an aviator, you can fly your favorite plane), think about how much you rely upon your instruments for guidance and what life would be like navigating without any instruments at all. Without out a gas gauge you don’t really know when you need to refuel. (The sputtering might give you a clue, but not really when it would be most useful). Without a speedometer, let’s just say many would be subsidizing local and state governments at a higher clip than they currently do. With the birth of in-dash GPS guidance systems, now we’re relying on our dashboards to literally route the way to where we need to go.

The purpose of the dashboard is to give an accurate read on how systems are functioning, how resources are being used, and how things are changing over time. For the last couple years we’ve begun to gather more metrics in LIS to get some better understandings of exactly how much we do of what we do. Those statistics have been published in our annual report, though annual collection of data doesn’t help to inform regular decisions that happen over the course of a year that could benefit from more data input.

Over the next weeks, we’ll begin to take our metrics to a new level by bringing some critical indicators together into a dashboard that we can use to see our operations in something closer to real-time. This will help us to concretely identify issues as they happen (changes in work orders, changes in resource usage, and the impact of changes in service or service levels). To start this process, I’ve tapped into some readily available data on our website and am continuing to refine and revise it. A screenshot is included here so you how it is developing. Eventually this will be regularly published (and will include a legend for reading it … for now talk to me with questions :).

I’ll be working with other teams in LIS to identify the critical indicators and create some conduits to gather and update those statistics regularly. As always, thoughts and comments are welcome.

TWILIS on Hiatus

This Week in LIS will not be published on September 19, 2008. It will resume Friday, September 26, 2008.

Personnel Updates

Our recruitments for Help Desk Specialist and Programmer Analyst are underway in the applicant review stage.

Upcoming Dates

September 16 (Tuesday) Office 2007/2008 Workshop – 9:00a
September 18 (Thursday) KATIE Faculty Development – 1:00p
September 23 (Tuesday) Norse Mail – 9:00a
September 23 (Tuesday) Norse Calendar – 10:30a
September 30 (Tuesday) Windows Vista Tips & Tricks – 9:00a
More information on upcoming training opportunities

LIS Blog Highlights from the Week

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

LIS Website Changes

Minor changes to the event management system were made this week.

Notes from LIS Council

The following topics were discussed at our meeting this week:

Next steps for choosing a software deployment systems
Resuming the staff computer replacement process
Deployment of School Dude for facilities work order tracking
Changes to the process for issuing Norse Keys to admitted students
Policies on file sharing
Our upcoming continuous improvement project
LIS Dashboard

NITLE Opportunities

As a member of NITLE (National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education), Luther has the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of developmental and training programs intended for faculty, librarians, and information technologists. Events listed at the link below are currently open for registration by Luther participants. LIS Staff who are interested in participating in an event should speak with Christopher Barth. Faculty who are interested in participating should speak with Lori Stanley. Participation is contingent upon available funding and program acceptance.

The following new NITLE opportunities are available:

Nominations due Friday, September 19th:
- NEW: Workshop-To-Go: Digital Teaching: Introduction to Teaching with Technology in Liberal Education. Program Date: October 13, 2008. Location: Bryn Mawr College. 4 program units.
- NEW: Workshop-To-Go: Technologies for Teaching Writing. Program Date: October 14, 2008. Location: Bryn Mawr College. 4 program units.
Nominations due Friday, October 24th:
- NEW: Online Event: Martin Dougiamas on Moodle’s Future. Previously titled “Moodle User Community Meeting.” Program Date & Time: November 6, 2008, 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Eastern. Delivered online via MIV. 1 program unit.

Complete List of NITLE Opportunities

Notable Internet Resource of the Week: Dropbox

Big news in the free online storage world this week as the cloud service Drop Box has launched out of beta and is now available for general use. Drop Box is a free 2GB storage drive in the cloud that:

is easily accessible to users from Windows, Macs, and Linux
allows public transfer of files
has no limit (aside from your storage quota) on file size
supports syncing of files across multiple computers and the Internet based storage site
automatically tracks old versions to support undelete and restoring from the Internet
allows custom sharing to be configured by file via the Internet
integrates a photo gallery

Additional storage can be purchased if needed.

On the web at http://www.getdropbox.com/