This Week in LIS - 8 June 2007

Upcoming Dates

• July 25: Summer Planning Day
• August 13: Staff Day

Revised Mission Statement

Based on comments and feedback on our draft mission statement, a slightly amended one is included below for review. This places the focus of our work more directly on the Luther community, and emphasizes LIS’ role as a support organization that succeeds only when those we serve succeed. As always, your comments are welcome.

Library and Information Services supports the work and mission of the Luther College community by providing:

• access to appropriate communication and information resources,
• expertise and training in the effective and efficient use of information, and
• a place to explore and express ideas, ourselves, and our community.

8:45s for Next Week

We’ll hold virtual meetings everyday next week.

Redundant Internet Service

We’re moving forward to both increase our off-campus bandwidth as well as add a second provider to provide redundancy and better service for Internet traffic. Our current 25mbps connection from the ICN will continue to be our primary network connection. To that we will add a separate 15mbps connection from NEIT giving us a total of 40mbps capacity for fall 2007. The new connection will be a wireless connection directly to Main which will also provide geographic redundancy for the ICN connection which comes to campus through the Library. We hope installation will happen in the coming weeks.

MISO

Completed data from MISO has been posted each day this week to the MISO project in Basecamp. Additional sections will be posted next week. We’ll review this data in more detail at our summer planning day as we set our specific goals for 2007-08.

Audit

Beginning with the 2007-08 academic year, all institutions of higher education are subject to new audit standards covering information technology … specifically the risks inherent in IT operations that may result in a material financial misstatement. Though we are not required to adhere to those standards for the just-completed year, we will undergo an audit next Monday and Tuesday looking at our compliance with the new standards as a way to identify any areas for improvement prior to next year’s audit. This is not a full audit of information technology and is pretty tightly focused on any systems that handle or track financial transactions.

Pandemic Plan

A final final draft of the LIS pandemic response plan is available in the Emergency Response Basecamp project. This document has undergone extensive revision and tightening up thanks to Cindy H. and is now ready to be shared on campus as appropriate. If your plans and areas of responsibility have significantly overlap and intersection with other operating units on campus, please share the relevant portions of this with them so that we can continue to refine our plan. Changes, additions, or corrections can be submitted any time to Cindy H. The College’s pandemic group is also about to reconvene and we will share this plan with them as well.

Library Website Redesign

Work is underway to port content from our old site into our content management system, with our first target deadline coming next week. We’ve also begun to discuss design issues and review potential design drafts. The Basecamp project for this project is now available for everyone under Web Redesign. Please feel free to follow the project and provide feedback.

A reminder that the web team has been tasked with migrating and generating content for the new site. They will be asking many in LIS to help develop content as necessary. Thanks for your assistance to them in any way you can help.

Cool Resource of the Week: SharedCopy.com

If you’re a fan of sticky notes and scribbles, then SharedCopy is for you, bringing anyone the ability to annotate web pages for yourself or to share with others. You can use bookmarklets to add stickies to pages, highlight text, draw lines, boxes, or circles on pages. With a free account, you can lock them. The system will generate URLs for you to share your comments with others as you like. Their API also allows for integration with other web tools. Ready integration is available for Twitter and Basecamp.

Around the Web

Here are a few links to interesting developments over the past (two) weeks:

The Final Days of Google [I, Cringely]
http://tinyurl.com/2s2tv6

Everything is Miscellaneous (Google TechTalk) [Google Video]
http://tinyurl.com/2sgza8

Anyone for a Gathering of Introverts? [New York Times]
http://tinyurl.com/33kkpb

In Fierce Competition, Google Finds Novel Ways to Feed Hiring Machine [New York Times]
http://tinyurl.com/39c9gy

Standing Up for Open Access [Inside Higher Ed]
http://tinyurl.com/2kyhph

Facebook Opens Its API in Hopes of Eclipsing MySpace [ars technica]
http://tinyurl.com/2z648s

As Opposition Mounts, FTC Agrees to Examine Google/DoubleClick Deal [ars technica]
http://tinyurl.com/24exom

Universities Respond to Decline in Computer Science Students [ars technica]
http://tinyurl.com/yo5wnd

CWA Survey: Average Broadband Speed in US is 1.9Mbps [ars technica]
http://tinyurl.com/2yt3yu

Don’t Just Search, Recruit [Chronicle of Higher Education]
http://tinyurl.com/2lfvev

Take Note: Computing Takes Up Pen, Again [New York Times]
http://tinyurl.com/3×2×58

iTunes U Comes to the iTunes Store [tuaw]
http://tinyurl.com/276sup

Google Maps Now with 360 Streetside Views [TechCrunch]
http://tinyurl.com/347dep

Wikipedia is Just the Start: An Interview with Jimmy Wales [Wired Epicenter]
http://tinyurl.com/29nb6f

Microsoft Exec: Future Versions of Windows to be “Fundamentally Redesigned” [ars technica]
http://tinyurl.com/2dj32r

Microsoft Surface Hits the Ground Running [Read/WriteWeb]
http://tinyurl.com/2kbzp6

Apple Debuts Unprotected Songs Online [Yahoo! News]
http://tinyurl.com/36qg3s

Facial Recognition Slipped into Google Image Search [ars technica]
http://tinyurl.com/23×5g8

Google Zooms In Too Close for Some [New York Times]
http://tinyurl.com/38vk4g

Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine [New York Times]
http://tinyurl.com/ywux9q

Gilbert Library to be First to Drop Dewey Decimal [azcentral.com]
http://tinyurl.com/2xqcus

Newspapers Need Google [BuzzMachine]
http://tinyurl.com/3xpngf

Time is the One True Limited Resource [Signal vs. Noise]
http://tinyurl.com/2tbr3a

In DRM We Trust: World Collection Societies Wring Hands Over P2P Copying [ars technica]
http://tinyurl.com/2cnctk

Spam Flows Despite High-Profile Arrest [Wired]
http://tinyurl.com/346pln

Yahoo!: The Web’s Future is not Search [Read/WriteWeb]
http://tinyurl.com/35a4ko

Science and Nature Rejecting Word 2007 Manuscripts [O’Reilly Radar]
http://tinyurl.com/2hvfkt

Ask.com Redesign Brings New Features, Integration [ars technica]
http://tinyurl.com/yv4bbo

Small Colleges Attract Faraway Sports Fans with Webcasting [Chronicle of Higher Education]
http://tinyurl.com/2oz9gd

Some Publishers Warm to Google Book Search [Chronicle of Higher Education]
http://tinyurl.com/2rvpzb

Sharing Ideas About Sharing Files [Inside Higher Ed]
http://tinyurl.com/3bp58u

Email Senders Can Pay to Bypass Filters [Yahoo! News]
http://tinyurl.com/3bazrd

Google: IIS Twice as Likely to Serve Malware as Apache [ars technica]
http://tinyurl.com/yvf6gd

Big Ten Joins Google Book Project [Yahoo! News]
http://tinyurl.com/2qvvae

2 Models for Digitizing Collections [Inside Higher Ed]
http://tinyurl.com/2w9xjk

Windows Vista: Under the Hood [ars technica]
http://tinyurl.com/28tr97

Censorship ‘Changes Face of Net’ [BBC News]
http://tinyurl.com/yqrl25

Tagging, No Longer Fun and Easy [Network World]
http://tinyurl.com/2qoljm

Wireless Power Lights Bulb 7 Feet Away [LiveScience.com]
http://tinyurl.com/33wuom

Congress, RIAA and Universities Prepare for P2P “Arms Race” [ars technica]
http://tinyurl.com/28cw2q

Akamai Releases Internet Traffic Visualizations [Read/WriteWeb]
http://tinyurl.com/2lkysa

Americans Willing to Pay (a Little) More for Privacy [ars technica]
http://tinyurl.com/2ae93c

Book Publisher Steals Google Laptops [The Register]
http://tinyurl.com/yqc6vm

Facebook’s Copyright Quagmire? [VentureBeat]
http://tinyurl.com/29b34l

Report: Little-Known AV Packages Outdo Those of Symantec, McAfee, Microsoft [ars technica]
http://tinyurl.com/2g5o7s