Brief explanation

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So… I got kind of stuck in the middle of a 4-part series when life and work swallowed all the time and energy I had for blogging. But the new school year has started, and there’s no way I’m going to let myself stretch out that series forever, so consider this throat-clearing and hello and happy fall term, everyone!

What we’ve worked on or implemented this summer, in no particular order, and only the things I can remember right this minute:

  • LibAnswers, including our first ever general chat reference service (we’ve had individual widgets on our guides for forever, but never a general service)
  • LibAnalytics
  • a Twitter account @GouldLibrary
  • an honest-to-goodness print center in the library
  • a new library director!
  • a new link resolver (SerialSolutions 360 Link, replacing SFX)
  • Summon (not yet live)
  • eBrary
  • a new staff member in the campus IT department that will work closely with the joint Research/IT service and whom I helped hire
  • a chapter for an edited volume co-authored with Steve Lawson and sent off to the editors
  • a new print management system
  • rethinking the statistics we keep
  • working on an article about our Information Literacy in Student Writing project
  • iPads for librarians! As part of a joint iPad Learning Community with St Olaf
  • reading hundreds of student papers for the Information Literacy in Student Writing project
  • And, of course, preparing for all the New Student Week activities and the extra services we run during the first portion of Fall term.
  • We joined in a Mellon grant for Digital Humanities and are helping organize a conference on the same
  • several of us are involved in organizing a conference on visuality in the curriculum
  • I helped pull together a workshop for faculty who would be teaching our first year seminars
  • and we redesigned our trading cards!

So yeah. It was a busy summer! And our summers don’t even start till mid-June!

Next up, finishing that four-part series (I swear I will), and maybe some musings on memory in a digital age, and probably updates about the iPad Learning Communities.

One thought on “Brief explanation”

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  • Wednesday, September 12th, 2012 at 8:44 pm Sir Shuping is just sir
    curious what type of stats did y'all rethink?
  • Wednesday, September 12th, 2012 at 9:11 pm John Dupuis
    How big a deal was it populating Libanswers? We just got it today and I'm responsible for the implementation.
  • Wednesday, September 12th, 2012 at 9:38 pm lris
    We are not making a huge deal out of it. We prepopulated just a few of the really common questions and then are going to review questions as they come in and make appropriate ones of those public.
  • Wednesday, September 12th, 2012 at 9:39 pm lris
    Andrew, we had been taking 3x-daily room usage stats (counting how many people were in the different regions of the reference room, how many of those people had laptops, were working in groups, etc). Now we're doing that detailed work during 2 weeks of each term and relying on the basic population-by-room counts that the circulation desk does every evening for the rest.
  • Wednesday, September 12th, 2012 at 11:04 pm ~Courtney F
    We're doing it the way Iris is. We have a few things preset, but we will review and add more as we need to
  • Wednesday, September 12th, 2012 at 11:06 pm Sir Shuping is just sir
    ah kay, thanks!

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