Travel Reports

Monday and Tuesday of this week I attended the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Membership Meeting in Washington, D.C.

T’was a blustery and way too early…

GusDay 10 was a fairly interesting day with a couple of good sessions and a very interesting tour and resulting conversation with some of Carleton’s people. Read on for more.

Marcia’s GusDay 10 highlights

-Ethan Sommers presented a session about how Gustavus is updating their student and faculty google calendars with information from Datatel. They use the data from the same export that they use for updating Moodle. They also have a master calendar @gustavus.edu in google. There is a limited amount of history that the google caledar stores, so Ethan also has a procedure to backup calendars from google. Ethan offered to share the programming code that he developed. They use EMS for their facilities scheduler.

-St. Bens/St.

Friday, December 4th a group from Luther traveled to Carleton College for GusDay which is an annual event designed for the technology staff from the Minnesota Private Colleges and other like-minded institutions to gather and share successes, challenges, strategies, and friendships.

They were hoping for 120 participants, and then for 150, and finally ended up with over 200 participants! At the end of the day, the hosts for the next three years were announced: Bethel (2011), St.

I spent the week of August 16-22 at the biennial churchwide assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in Minneapolis, MN. The ELCA archives is in the midst of an oral history project in preparation for the church’s 25th anniversary in 2012 and decided to collect shorter stories during the assembly. They asked me to help out for the week, so I joined them at Minneapolis Convention Center.

We conducted over 50 interviews over the week, all on video and generally between 10 and 15 minutes in length. I interviewed people ranging in age from their teens to 90 years old.

From June 26-29, 2009 I attended the ResNet Symposium conference that was held at St. Cloud State University this year. There were fewer participants in this year’s than in past years, but there were still plenty of informative sessions to attend and plenty of colleagues from other institutions to talk with.

Last Thursday and Friday I attended the IAICU Technology Conference hosted by Morningside College. IAICU (Iowa Association of Independent Colleges & Universities) is the consortium through which we obtain many benefits such as special pricing on SPSS and our Microsoft Campus Agreement.

The theme of the conference was “Collaborate and Share Information” and there was plenty of both throughout the two days.

Last Thursday I traveled to Dubuque with Ryan to the annual IPAL meeting. Ryan has ably described Bob Molyneux’s presentation. We were treated to a “state of the State Library” presentation by Librarian Mary Wegner (proud parent of a Luther student) and, as usual at IPAL, I enjoyed several conversations with colleagues from around the state.

On Thursday and Friday of last week I attended two conferences geared toward academic librarians in Iowa. The first was the Iowa Private Academic Libraries (IPAL) annual meeting. Our guest for the day was Bob Molyneux, from Equinox, the company behind the Evergreen open source library system.

I attended the Datatel Users Group conference on April 5-8. Following is a summary of the highlights from the conference:

1) IT trends and futures – Datatel is developing a new web-based user interface that will be called “User Interface 4.0”. Luther has joined the first client trial to test new functionality and provide early feedback to Datatel. We’ll be installing this within the next few weeks and hope to allow some end users to help us with the testing.