This Week in LIS - 9 July 2010

Headline of the Week: Charting a Course for Greater Collaboration

At our annual strategic planning day last month, LIS spent a little time brainstorming potential opportunities for greater collaboration. We know that greater cooperation and collaboration with others will form a significant part of our future and we want to be regularly assessing the best opportunities for more collaborative work and pursuing these relationships as conditions are conducive to doing so.

We already have a number of fruitful and significant collaborations underway (discussed in our annual report). However, historically our geographical location has served a something of a barrier to deeper consortial partnerships. In a digital age, with issues of geography mitigated by the Internet, we have a fresh opportunity to consider how we can work better with those nearby to us, as well as those around the country. Partnerships with non-higher education institutions is also an avenue we want to explore where appropriate.

We have compiled a first draft list of proposals, included below, and now available on our LIS Ideas website. Please visit the site to vote up or vote down these ideas and leave your comments and perspectives. Have additional ideas of how we could collaborate better or more effectively? You can leave them at the site for consideration.

Cooperative Interlibrary Loan – Requests could be filled by any of a number of institutions allowing for uninterrupted service (during vacations, etc.)

Library Catalog System – Many consortia and other groups already share central infrastructure and staffing support (with resulting improvements in resource sharing). This could also extend to discovery layers (e.g. Encore).

Public Library Collaboration – Tailoring services to dovetail and provide expanded collections and services to all users in Decorah and Winneshiek County.

Business Continuity Operations – Collaborating with other institutions (either local in Decorah, or other colleges regionally) for off-site backup, data services, and emergency operations (library and technology services).

Expanded Collaborative Training Opportunities – Partnering with schools with the same systems on training as well as harmonizing projects/upgrade timelines.

Cloud-Based Desktop Virtualization – Luther’s participation in LabSTOR in 2010-11 will begin explorations in delivering academic computing lab software via a virtual cloud-based service.

Digital Library Infrastructure / Institutional Repositories – As collections move more to digital content, multiple institutions could collaborate on cloud-based digital data warehousing and discovery tools.

Pursue Collaborative Events for Iowa Colleges/Regional Colleges – Other states seem to offer more collaborative opportunities. Can we expand opportunities here, and with whom does this make sense?

Identity Management – Can we capitalize on technologies such as Shibboleth that provide federated identity management to build a multi-institutional identity management infrastructure?

Shared Learning Management System – Coordinated with more cooperative academic programs and offerings, can we provide shared central, cloud-based LMS services for multiple campuses simultaneously?

Decorah MetroNet – Work is underway to connect local institutions via fiber to allow for better data sharing opportunities.

Virtual Research/Technology Assistance – Utilizing virtual tools such as chat, can we share research and technology help support with other institutions to expand hours and be more flexible in how we deliver these services?

More Intentional Collaboration with Faculty and Staff – Spend more time in the classroom with faculty and students to be better equipped to guide and support the curriculum. Spend more time in departmental offices to better understand workflows to be better equipped to support administrative work.

Information Fluency Initiatives – Are there opportunities to jointly design, manage, promote, and build information fluency initiatives in a multi-campus setting (perhaps both with other colleges, but also with K-12)?

Internship Experiences for Students – Can we partner with others to provide richer experiences for internships/work opportunities for students in information-related professions.

Pursue Larger Group Purchase Opportunities – Workstations, central network equipment, enterprise systems, more library resources are all candidates for broader cooperation in purchasing in order to lower overall costs.

Cooperative Collection Development – Work with other institutions to more finely focus individual institutional collections while improving access/delivery across collections to maximize budgets and expand access to resources.

Potential Partners – Decorah Businesses and Government, County Businesses and Government, NICC, Regional Colleges, State Universities, IPAL, IAICU, NITLE, CLIR

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LIS Blog Highlights from the Week

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

• Summer Reading at Preus Library
• ResNet Symposium 2010
• Digital Signage in the Regents
• Peace Dining A/V Project Completed
• Summer 2010 Faculty Rollout has Begun!
• Mahara ePortfolio Upgraded at Luther [Luther Only]
• iPad Training Information
• LIS Ideas Site Changes

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Notes from LIS Council

LIS Council is the leadership team within LIS. Among the topics discussed this past week were:

Council did not meet this week.

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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.

Upcoming NITLE events:

A full list of events (sortable by registration deadline) is available at http://www.nitle.org/events/calendar.php

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Upcoming LIS Training, Instruction, and Professional Development Opportunities

Click on the event below for specific information and for a link to register. More information on training and development events is available.

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Internet Resource of the Week: Open Clip Art Library

The Open Clip Art Library is a repository for public domain art available for download and use personally or commercially. Now six years old and with tens of thousands of images available, the site offers keyword subject searching, browsing by artist/uploader, and also makes periodic packages of artwork available for bulk download.

On the web at http://www.openclipart.org/

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Quote(s) of the Week:

• “Humans like to believe they control the tools they use, even if Socrates, Marshall McLuhan and Ivan Illich are among those who have argued that often they do not. From the alphabet to clocks and printing, every major new technology has profoundly altered the way in which humans think. The digital gadgets on which we now depend, Mr Carr explains, have already begun rewiring our brains.” – The effects of the internet: Fast forward | The Economist

• “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” – Benjamin Franklin

• “The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it. The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.” – Prince

• “But let’s face it, books are dead. They’re a great technology, and will always be a great technology, and we’re not getting rid of them because they don’t work. We need to get rid of them because they don’t fit this new digital world.” – Google and Penguin: Bookending a Revolution – loose wire blog

• “… social media is not about online at all. It’s about the same human interactions and collaborations that we have enjoyed offline for many many years. In fact for as long as human beings have been social animals. Technology just lets us do more of these things, in different ways and, perhaps critically, with people we don’t know, that we are not near and at different times to them. Social media just lets us do things we have always done offline in bigger and better ways. So it should be natural that we consider it as having offline implications as well as online ones. But too often we don’t.” – Social Media Does Not Just Take Place Online | Futurelab

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Video of the Week: Message: All Creative Work is Derivative

Why: Copyright control extends not just to verbatim copies, but to “derivative works.” This has led to censorship on a grand scale. For example, the seminal German silent film “Nosferatu” was deemed a derivative work of “Dracula” and courts ordered all copies destroyed. Shortly before his death, author J.D. Salinger convinced U.S. courts to censor another author who transformed his characters. And so on.

The whole history of human culture evolves through copying, making tiny transformations (sometimes called “errors”) with each replication. Copying is the engine of cultural progress. It is not “stealing.” It is, in fact, quite beautiful, and leads to a cultural diversity that inspires awe.

» via QuestionCopyright.org

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Links of the Week

• On vacation, tech-loving kids — and parents — find it hard to unplug [Washington Post]
• Fighting with Teenagers: A Copyright Story [Jason Robert Brown]
• Embedded librarians: Johns Hopkins’ “Informationists” and the “Distributed” Library Model [USA Today]
• RIAA Warns 1 Million Copyright Infringers a Year [TorrentFreak]
• Tenure, RIP [Chronicle of Higher Education]
• To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery [New York Times]
• For a New Generation, an Elusive American Dream [New York Times]
• Canadian University Hopes to Lead Fight Against High Subscription Prices [Chronicle of Higher Education]
• What happened to studying? [Boston Globe]
• Blackboard to Buy Two Education-Software Companies—Elluminate and Wimba [Chronicle of Higher Education]
• Why Libraries Filed a Brief in a Case About Watches [Association of Research Libraries]
• The Demise of the $200 Textbook [GOOD]
• Study: Younger Teachers No More Likely to Integrate Tech in Lessons Than Vets [eSchoolNews]
• Study – Colleges Spent More on Recreation Than Instruction [New York Times]

The links and media above are selected from material posted to pulse.infoneer.net, which gathers links and comment on the worlds of libraries, technology, higher education, culture, intellectual property, copyright, information, ethics, design, professional identity, leadership, and the future. The full content feed is available by Daily Email Digest or “RSS“:http://feeds.feedburner.com/infoneer

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Next Issue

The next issue of TWILIS will be published on Friday, July 16th.

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This Week in LIS is published most Fridays by Christopher Barth, Executive Director of Library and Information Services at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.

This issue is Volume 4, Number 35 (#162)

Content is made available under Creative Commons license.