This is a good time to reflect on 2017, a memorable year. I always think about these man made arbitrary boundaries such as weekends and end of the year which influences how one feels. We all get excited on Friday about the next two days and the same way we look forward to a new year during the last few days of December. And we make New Year’s resolutions which have a tremendously high failure rates.

In this piece titled “The Only Way to Keep Your Resolutions“, the author says “By Jan. 8, some 25 percent of resolutions have fallen by the wayside.” The author makes an argument that keeping up resolutions requires willpower and self-control which are extremely hard. Instead he proposes that we cultivate social emotions. “In nudging the mind to be more patient and more selfless, they benefit everyone whom our decisions impact, including our own future selves. In short, they give us not only grit but also grace.” As a skeptic of the typical New Year’s resolutions, this sounds like a plan to me!

I don’t intend to mention everything that we did during the year because we capture these in our annual report well. I just want to point some of the highlights.

2017 was significant year for LTS. We successfully began our journey away from an ERP system that has been used at the College for over 25 years. We implemented both Workday HCM and Finance successfully and the community is greatly benefitting from these changes. Several functional offices and LTS collaborated in a fantastic fashion to make this happen and several business processes were redone in the process. We continue to look for and change inefficiencies on a continuous basis. Frankly, I am amazed at the support we have received from our community for a major change like this, which in itself is extremely important for the success of such a mega-implementation.

Talking about continuous change, we will begin a major construction project in the Science building in 2018 and one of the decisions that has been made is to significantly shrink the space occupied by the Science Library. The way science faculty and students access the library resources in the sciences has dramatically changed in recent years and they access electronic resources far more than the physical collections in the Library. In collaboration with the faculty, the physical collection space in the Science Library will be reduced significantly. Access to print collection will remain identical, but the access methods will be different. Thanks to our strong resource sharing partnerships with other libraries, our own remote storage facility and participation in the EAST (Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust) project, access to print collections will remain strong. Not all print collections will be in the stacks in the new science library and many of these will have to be retrieved from elsewhere. The whole project to manage this change is daunting (deciding which collections will stay, which will move to where etc) but exciting as well.

Finally, I want to mention that nine of our staff members decided to retire in 2017 as a part of the College’s Voluntary Retirement Program. My senior leadership team and I have been thinking about treating this as an opportunity to reorganize with reduced staffing, while ensuring that the strategic services will continue to be delivered at the highest levels that the community has gotten used to. This is another change that we have to manage and the community will need to be prepared for.

The advice from David DeSteno, in “”The Only Way to Keep Your Resolutions“,  is timely and appropriate as we begin 2018 – “So as 2018 commences, take more time to cultivate these [social] emotions. Reflect on what you’re grateful to have been given. Allow your mind to step into the shoes of those in need and feel for them. Take pride in the small achievements on the path to your goals. Doing so will help ensure that every future New Year’s Eve will have more to celebrate than to regret.”