LIS News

MaintenanceDirect™ Online Work Order Management System has been purchased for Facilities Management. The first training session for Jay, Steve, and Loreen, is scheduled for July 3rd at 9 a.m. in Main 12.

"MaintenanceDirect is a powerful, on-demand work management tool that helps you streamline the entire work order process from request to completion." This subscription based software is hosted off campus and will replace the FixIt MS Access database that is currently in use. Jay plans to be using Maintenance Direct to manage work requests by August.

www.schooldude.com

As we move to our upcoming launch of a new academic research portal for Luther, we now have a functioning “home page” that is open for beta-testing and review by LIS staff and others with an interest in such things. The page is located at http://lis.luther.edu/research and consists of the following current features:

• A top refreshing section for keyword searching of multiple sources including Encore, Magnus, find.luther.edu, Google, and WorldCat. Research Pro (our federated database tool) will also be searchable from this location after implementation. Encore is the default search tool.

This summer, LIS will spend some time thinking about our marketing strategies across all our services and brands with an eye to creating a more standard suite of marketing media and tools. Included in this discussion will be a good look at how we communicate externally with our constituents, and how we would like to be conducting those communications. We also want to focus on simplicity and consistency. I'm interesting in identifying any volunteers within LIS who are interested and willing to participate in some of these discussions.

NITLE invites its participants to respond to the following calls for proposals for fall 2008 programs. In addition to building their professional experience, accepted presenters will help shape the agenda for these professional development programs via their contributions. Proposals for all calls are due by June 30, 2008. Please note that registration for all of these programs is currently open and managed on a first-come, first-served basis.

NITLE (National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education) offers a wide variety of peer communities designed to foster inter-campus collaboration and communication. Specific areas available include:

• Al Musharaka Discussion
• Arabic Teaching Discussion
• Chinese Community Discussion
• Core Services Discussion
• DSpace Repository Discussion
• Information Services Leaders Discussion
• Instructional Technologists Discussion
• Language Technology Discussion
• Moodle Exchange
• NITLE Advising
• Sakai Discussion
• Spatial Analysis and Mapping (formerly GIS) Discussion

Congratulations to Bob Puffer who has been named by NITLE (National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education) as a Technology Fellow in the area of the Moodle Learning Management system. The following is from the NITLE website and describes the fellowship:

This person would take a leading role with NITLE education initiatives relating to Moodle; specifically this person would assist NITLE and the community of NITLE participating campuses in areas such as:

• designing and delivering training to campuses new to Moodle

Microsoft's promotion “The Ultimate Steal” has been extended until May 16, 2008. Microsoft is offering Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for $59.95 to students enrolled at an U.S. educational institution. For more information, visit http://www.theultimatesteal.com. A notice regarding this promotion has been submitted for inclusion in The Bulletin.

As part of the work to implement academic research guides into Drupal, we’ve added an academic subject taxonomy to the LIS Blog that allows individual posts to be tagged for specific academic disciplines. The taxonomy is not required, and should not be used for content not targeted for academic areas. We would like to encourage more posts targeting academic disciplines as appropriate as this content is now being pulled out into specific pages for each discipline. It will also be available in targeted RSS feeds by discipline.

As our needs for delivering multimedia content across the curriculum and administration continue to increase, we are always looking for options that can accomplish this task easily and broadly. One option is a program offered by Apple called iTunesU (http://www.apple.com/education/itunesu_mobilelearning/itunesu.html) that allows us a storefront within iTunes to deliver content directly to listeners and viewers via that popular media management tool and directly to iPods. We have been approved for a Luther instance of iTunesU and will be working to implement the product soon.

FREE Web Conferencing to take the place of Elluminate, Webex, GoToMeeting, etc. We've been looking at DimDim for a while since there's a loose integration with Moodle out there. Its a solid product, easy to use with lots of features: http://www.dimdim.com.