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.
Rock on, Iris and colleagues!