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Category: Carleton

New Email/Calendar System: Week Three

Published by Iris on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

The new email system is all-around ok, but it’s by no means been a seamless transition for my department. My new mantra (and I swear I’m going to stick a little card on my computer monitor that says this) is:

Even this is worth it if the whole campus is on one system.

For one thing, it’s thrown a little monkey wrench into my department’s system of publishing our availability to our students. Last year we came up with a pretty slick plan of using Google Calendar, sharing our calendars with each other (to facilitate making meetings), and publishing separate “Available Time” calendars for everyone else to see (example). It worked very nicely.

Well now we’ve got our Zimbra calendars, which are really only useful if everyone uses them. These are very much like Outlook calendars, or Groupwise calendars. You know the drill: email and calendar all in one place, people can see when you’re busy when they schedule meetings… the whole nine yards. Except that in our case, we’re only up to about 4 yards because of two significant kinks.

First, even if we use Google Calendars to subscribe to our Zimbra calendar’s iCal feed, we cannot make Google Calendar understand that this is ok to publish this on our HTML web pages. We’re now in the process of searching for another 3rd party program that we could use to mimic this functionality, but currently we’re stuck updating two calendars. Why? Because even though students could propose a meeting time and see if we’re free, we don’t know how many students will be using the calendar function this first year, and we do know that sometimes it’s much easier just to glance at a calendar a week at a time to get a feel for free time. With all the appointments we do, we need an easy way for students to see when they can come see us that doesn’t require any training. So that knocks about two and a half yards off the “whole” right there.

Second, not everyone is going to use this new calendaring system. I know of one whole department in the library that’s said it’s going to stick with a Google Calendar system that’s working well. And I know full well that many professors and students won’t bother. This means that even within the library we won’t be able to use the new system to it’s full potential, let alone with the wider campus. So that knocks at least another yard off, if not two, and my optimistic nature has to work even harder to sprinkle it’s habitual pixie dust over the situation and keep me mellow in the belief that this will be wonderful.

A third kink doesn’t come nearly to the level of the first two, which is why I didn’t include it above. But for now it’s a pain. For now, we can’t sync with our palm pilots, so that means maintaining yet a third calendar for all those times when you’re in meetings trying to schedule new meetings and really need a portable calendar. (And no, we don’t have cool data-enabled phones, more’s the pity.) But hopefully this kink will disappear very soon, which is why I choose not to be annoyed by it for now.

Still, my optimistic self keeps thinking that there is still value in having a campus-wide system, and that there’s enough value that even this is worth it.

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Online Research Guides

Published by Iris on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

As part of my liaison duties, I create and maintain the “subject” and “course” research guides designed for the departments I serve. Subject research guides are meant to give students a grasp of the resources available that most researchers in a given major or concentration will probably need at some point in their research. Course research guides are designed for specific courses that I’m supporting each term.

And really, the course research guides are pretty simple to come up with. They usually either replace or complement any handouts that are appropriate for a class, and they’re almost always tied to a specific assignment or set of assignments, so I generally have a fairly good idea of what those students will need.

Subject research guides are another matter entirely. I have no idea what I’m doing, really. Do I gather things by resource type (e.g. “Finding books,” “Finding articles,” “Useful web sites,” etc.), or do I gather things by topic? (Here’s an example of a page that’s organized by resource-type, and here’s one that’s organized by topic.) Either way, they’re long lists of stuff, and not very interesting, but with our current tools I’m tied to a heavily text-based, straight HTML page.

When you think about it, the idea of breaking things up by resource type vs. topic really comes down to your choice of audience. Am I creating these primarily for inexperienced researchers who need help getting started? If so, topical organization seems to make sense. It pulls together fewer things and makes it so students don’t have to jump around to see if other resource-types will be useful to their topics. But if I’m primarily making these things for more intermediate-level researchers who already know that all they want is the MLA International Bibliography, for example, a page full of topics (where the MLA-IB could appear in any one of the topics, or all of them) would probably drive them batty! If I were using these pages, I’d want to click “articles” and see a short list of the databases and indexes that are relevant to an area of study.

So who is my audience? I don’t really know. But I’ve finally realized that answering this question could make the creation of these subject pages so much easier.

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Fall Publicity

Published by Iris on Monday, August 13th, 2007

I hadn’t really realized before coming here how important publicity is on a campus. Students aren’t naturally equipped with a gene that tells them to visit the library when they have one type of question, the writing center when they have another type of question, the IT help desk when they have yet another type of question, and so on. Neither are faculty, for that matter. So getting ready for fall means thinking up how to explain to new students precisely what we do, and how to encourage returning students to remember us without boring them to death with the same old news. Similarly, new faculty need to know both what we can do for them, and what we can do for their students. And the faculty who’ve always been here still need reminders, preferably packaged in such a way that they think of new and creative uses for us. That’s a pretty tall order for a department without its own publicist! That’d be a tall order for a publicist, I imagine, though I’d really like to find out (hint, hint).

On our task list for this fall we have:

  • New quiet level posters outfitted to represent our new and more realistic food and beverage policy (and with new level names for the 3rd and 4th floors… to be unveiled shortly)
  • New “Survival Guide” for the freshmen (quick overview of services and resources, plus a humorous “Top 10 Reasons to Visit the Libe”
  • Update the New Faculty Guide
  • New poster to hang at various points around the library to advertise the Research/IT service
  • New trading cards (being worked on in the next room at this very moment)
  • New portable maps of the library to reflect updated equipment and such
  • Planning for the beginning of the year picnic for faculty and academic staff (includes designing and making the invitational postcards)
  • Planning for the international student orientation
  • Planning for the new faculty orientation
  • Planning for the new student Academic Fair
  • Participating in the training of new writing tutors
  • Plan for and train student workers who are going to staff the IT side of the Research/IT desk.
  • Update our liaison pages to reflect tweaked liaison areas and new trading cards
  • Update the poster by the Research/IT desk that lists our liaison areas
  • Draft a beginning-of-the-year informational and (hopefully) inspirational email to send to each of our faculty members
  • Read the college Common Reading book so that we can participate in that whole experience
  • … and probably a whole host of things I’ve forgotten about…

Luckily most of these activities are interesting, and some are even really fun.

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New Email/Calendar System: Day One

Published by Iris on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

This morning when I arrived at work, only one email appeared in my inbox. The long-anticipated day had come. All my email had been migrated from our imap server to our bran’-spankin’ new Zimbra system.

Until today, members of our campus have used not one but several email systems. Faculty and academic staff were on one (but could use one of at least three supported access methods, including webmail and two desktop clients). Administrative and other staff were on a completely separate system (GroupWise). I’m not sure what students were on (though I know it wasn’t GroupWise). So as much as we’ve all been dreading the migration headache, clearly we needed a change.

So today I became one of the first groups of people on campus to migrate over to Zimbra, but most of my day was spent in meetings, so I didn’t have a whole lot of time to tinker, play, and futz. So the impressions I have are just that: impressions. And I’m not sure if it’s wishful thinking, the “oooh, shiny” factor, or something more substantial that makes me generally want to like it. But I generally want to like it, and I certainly do anticipate the joys of being able to search for common free time when setting up meetings (this will be the first time our whole campus has had a single calendaring system, too). I also like the tagging and message search functions.

But there are a couple of strangenesses, too. For example, there’s no way to copy a message to a folder; you have to just flat out move it. I can’t customize my view quite the way I’d like. Things seem to take several clicks rather than one or two. I don’t think there are any notifications for new messages, or any indication if you’re in the calendar view that there may be new messages waiting for you if you click over to mail view. But most puzzling (though not Zimbra’s fault), is that I now have three complete calendars, each of which need updating. My palm needs all my information so that it can go with me to meetings. My google calendar needs at least some of my information, but exactly how much will depend on departmental decisions that haven’t yet been made. And I’m strangely fond of my published availability calendar, which wouldn’t be possible if I dropped my google calendar. Then there’s the zimbra calendar, which must be used if people are to be able to easily schedule meetings with me via the new all-campus system. Something’s gotta give, but I have to keep them all up until I figure out what I can drop without hampering my work and that of my colleagues.

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