I am glad to begin my first post on the Wellesley blog about two months after I began my work here. In the two months, I have had a chance to meet with many of the faculty and staff. In addition, it was a lot of fun to meet with two groups of Albright Fellows to discuss how technologies, especially  communication technologies, are influencing the world. I have also spent time trying to understand the work of all Information Services staff. It has been a pretty busy couple of months.

However, thanks to all the IS staff, we have made a lot of progress in such a short period of time, some of which I will discuss here.

Soon after I accepted my position in October, I began having conversations with my Directors and it became apparent that IS may not have been organized optimally. This also became apparent in discussions with the staff. So, we began a very collaborative and open process involving everyone in IS (primarily using a Sakai forum) to discuss how best to reorganize. I am very happy to report that we have a much clearer organization which we will announce to the community in the next couple of weeks. The placement of staff in various groups will be based on their primary functions and we will begin building teams that brings staff from different groups together to get the job done. And the project lead will be empowered to run the project!

As we were having these discussions, I challenged the staff to get a list of 20+ items done by Jan 31. Many of these emerged from things I heard during when I interviewed for the CIO position as well as during my initial meetings with the community members. And I am happy to report that most of these will be completed by the deadline.

These changes are being communicated as we speak – some of the changes are going to significantly alter the use of computers in the classroom for the better (faster logins after the first login, persistence of bookmarks and installed software, more proactive monitoring of multimedia in the classroom and expanded hours for the Help Desk to help answer questions before classes start and a little after the last classes begin). On Jan 18, we released a nice set of applications for PDAs (Blackberry, iPhone, and Droid) for  students and our team is working hard to release a set of  applications for use by faculty and staff in February. These will be “pilots,” meaning, we will be looking for feedback from users to refine them. This approach will be the topic of one of my future posts here.

You will soon hear others — for example, we will be activating a 1 gigabit connection to the internet (compared to 160 megabit or so in the past) in the next few days; we will have 15 iPads in the library available for circulation; we will be announcing easier remote access (from home and elsewhere) to Wellesley services using VPN (Virtual Private Network — which means when one uses it to connect from home, the home computer behaves like it is on Wellesley network!) sometime in February; we will choose an institutional repository for Wellesley by February; and many more. I want to thank the IS staff for working hard to make all of this happen!

How can we forget the other major initiative — Unified Communication! As many of you heard from me, I recommended that we continue with the process to migrate to Sakai as the learning management system. Thanks to the Sakai team, this transition is progressing well and the team is gearing up for stronger faculty support during the beginning of the Spring semester to ease the transition pains.

I am very happy to report that the Advisory Committee on Library and Technology Policy members have been terrific in offering their valuable time even during the semester break to review the recommended choices for email/calendaring tools. We have seen Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Live (Outlook/Exchange) so far and we will be seeing a demo of Zimbra to round up the choices. We have a meeting in February to discuss the next steps of community input in helping choose a product so we can move forward.

I also met with the very dedicated Friends of the Library (FOL) steering committee on Jan. 11. They released the use of the “Future of Reading” fund for innovative proposals in this area. We are discussing a very exciting proposal submitted on “Serving Academic Library Collections on Ebook Readers.” We are revising this proposal to address some questions we  share. I am pretty confident that we will be funding this.

As you can see, we have a lot going on! And we have a similar “expectation list” for June 2010.

By the way, in the middle of all of this, we also managed to install WordPress blogs on a Wellesley server and configure them for various uses. This blog is one of the first.