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This Week in LIS - 11 July 2008

Weekly news and updates from Luther College Information Technology Services. To receive email updates, please sign up here.

By bartch02

Upcoming Dates

  • July 14 (Monday) KATIE Workshop – 9:00 am
  • July 21 (Monday) Windows Vista Demonstration – 11:00 am
  • July 23 (Wednesday) LIS Summer Staff Day – 9:00 am
  • July 28 (Monday) Norse Apps Demonstration – 11:00 am
  • July 30 (Wednesday) Norse Mail, Chat, and Start Page Workshop – 9:00 am
  • July 30 (Wednesday) Norse Calendar and Docs Workshop – 10:45 am
  • More information on upcoming training opportunities: http://lis.luther.edu/learn

Headline of the Week: Draft Annual Report

A preliminary and very draft version of the 2007-08 LIS Annual Report is now available for review. I want to encourage LIS staff to review it and to please make additions, corrections, and changes as appropriate. Several notes to note:

  • The report is being published online this year. In an effort to reduce paper use, and to produce more documents primarily for the web, we are using our Drupal publishing system to manage the report. All LIS staff have editing rights to the report itself, so you should be able to make changes by clicking on the Edit tab on any given page. Please note that markup is Textile.
  • A number of parts of the report are still being prepared (full list available), so please be aware changes will be many and frequent over the next couple weeks.
  • Please note that any information that you think should be present that isn’t is not intentional. This document is attempt to synthesize more than 15 individual and team reports submitted in June and inevitably it is still uneven and incomplete in some areas. I will be working to smooth things out, gather additional information and clean it up … I’d like to ask your help to do so as well.
  • The final report will be published Friday, August 15th along with the accompanying Snapshot, which will be published both electronically and in print.

As is clear from the report, LIS is a complex and busy organization that as a result of the good work of LIS staff manages to provide a very wide variety of information support services to the diverse Luther community. Thanks to everyone for making this annual review very substantive.

LIS Summer Staff Day

On Wednesday, July 23rd, LIS will meet together to review accomplishments from the 2007-08 academic year and discuss a number of initiatives for 2008-09. Tentative agenda items for the meeting include discussion of our 2008-09 objectives, time management and scheduling within LIS, our communication plan, and strategies for innovation and improvement of LIS work processes. Lunch will be provided.

LIS Blog Highlights from the Week

The following articles are sampled from those available on the LIS Blog:

LIS Website Changes

  • The new research portal is functioning following launch on July 3rd. Some minor changes continue to be made based on user feedback.
  • Some design work is beginning to address some new site functionality that may result in some changes to look-and-feel and page layout.

Notes from LIS Council

LIS Council discussed the upcoming summer planning day, preparing for work on the LIS marketing plan, and documents from LIS needed in support of Luther’s reaccreditation work.

NITLE Opportunities

As a member of NITLE (National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education), Luther has the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of developmental and training programs intended for faculty, librarians, and information technologists. Events listed at the link below are currently open for registration by Luther participants. LIS Staff who are interested in participating in an event should speak with Christopher Barth. Faculty who are interested in participating should speak with Lori Stanley. Participation is contingent upon available funding and program acceptance.

Complete List of NITLE Opportunities

Notable Internet Resource of the Week: WhatTheFont

Maybe this is a little on the design-geek side, but if you’ve ever seen a font and wondered what it was (which would let you figure out how to get it and use it yourself), WhatTheFont is a service that accepts scanned images of fonts and attempts to recognize them and give you information on the particular font face and family. The system doesn’t always work, which is where the crowdsourcing backup option comes in handy. Their forums are monitored by font-geeks from around the world who can more often than not identify a font for you even if the computer cannot. Guidelines for submitted images and tips on successful results are included on the website.

On the web at http://www.whatthefont.com/

Around the Web

Here are a few links to interesting developments over the past week:

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