It has been a couple of weeks since I wrote a post here. It is certainly not because I have been busier than usual – in fact I forced myself to work from home a couple of days in the past two weeks to get some real work done. Time just flies, especially when there is a lot going on. Yesterday evening we went to hear a South Indian classical music concert by T.M. Krishna at the Stata Center in MIT. It was a fantastic 4 hour concert that once upon a time only those living in Chennai in South India were treated to. This is one of the benefits of living near Boston – we get to hear a lot of quality Indian music. We used to drive two hours from Middletown, CT to come to Boston to hear some of the best artists. Our jealous friends from central CT, who had two hours of driving left while it was a mere 20 minutes for us now, were making a note that how bright it was (at 8 PM) – as if it was going to last till 10 PM!

I got up at my usual time at 5:30 to see the brightness after a whole week of miserable weather. The apocalypse that was promised on 21st of May has come and gone and we all are still here. I remember the days when the academic cycle’s effect on libraries and technologies were far more noticeable than now – especially on technology support. Summer was a time to engage in all sorts of major projects (because it was the “lean time”) to get ready for the Fall. Whereas this continues to be true (you can tell that the summer has begun by looking at all the books that are waiting to be shelved!), it just doesn’t feel the same. It seems that we are engaged in major projects all the time!

We have so many projects that we are already working on that will continue. Of course, the mother of all projects is the transition to Google Apps for Education. We have already created the accounts for entering students successfully and have tested the move of a good number of LTS staff to Google that also tested the methodology being used to copy emails from FirstClass. All in all, things are going well. Our implementation team is doing a great job!

At the last all-LTS meeting, we got a preview of the Web-scale Discovery tool called Summon that we will be rolling out in the Fall. This will simplify how we search for information both in our library catalog as well as other information resources such as journals. We will be working to iron out some of the remaining details and get it ready for the rollout.

Our mobile app team is busy designing additional apps, an announcement about a cool app is forthcoming. We are in the beginning stages of a Drupal implementation plan – our programmers were at the “code sprint” in Middlebury college to observe programmers from Amherst and Middlebury working to convert the monster menus module for Drupal 7. Our staff are also engaged in the installation of a program called fsaATLAS (who comes up with these names?) for supporting data on international students. There are special regulations and reporting requirements when it comes to international students these days. When I was an international student, I thought that the requirements were way over board! It is nothing compared to what is required now.

Our staff in special collections have worked hard to find ways to digitize some of the precious materials that are there. There will be some exciting news forthcoming regarding a project to digitize a real “special” collection! Stay tuned.

I am also thrilled that one of our programming staff has figured out an easy way for programs written in pretty much any programming language to invoke it from portal with information sharing. SunGard provides this facility in a more complicated fashion. This means we can now easily write programs completely external to the portal, still using all the data from Banner and the Datamart, but customizing the information based on who it is that invoked the program from the portal. This is very special indeed!

We also have a plan to create email aliases for all users by mid-September in Google Apps. The aliases will be firstname.lastname@wellesley.edu, preferredname.lastname@wellesley.edu and for those whose domain username is truncated to 8 characters, another alias that is the untruncated username. We have a whole slew of tiebreaker rules that involve middle initial, also taking into consideration those who, like me, do not have a middle initial! I know that this is a really tough project to implement, but, we are going to have a lot of very satisfied users in the end. Thank you team for helping us with this!

There are far too many interesting projects to list them all here, but, be assured that a lot is going on.

I cannot forget to mention that we are piloting the use of exercise balls/chair balls. I have been using one at home for a few weeks and it is great – for posture as well as for a mild lower abdominal exercise. I am glad to see that several LTS staff have signed up to use them. Our friends in CWS have already been using these chairs and Joanne Murray, made sure that I knew that they beat us to it and if I heard her right, she challenged us to a competition. We accept the challenge (BTW, what is the challenge?), Joanne!

The LTS team, called Geeks in Sneaks (GiS) won this year’s Spring into Shape competition. I was a member of the team and it was fun. So, we can take on the Chair Ball Challenge!