This is the time of the year when you hear “Where did the summer go?”. Thats right, summer just went and here we are, welcoming our students over the next few days before the classes begin. Our attention at this point is getting some of the most important communication out to the faculty, staff and students about the changes in matters related to the Library and Technology and making sure that every service that our faculty, staff and students rely on, that we support, works and works reliably and well.

We have an exciting year ahead of us with some major projects such as Workday Student, which I will continue to write as we march forward. We will soon be releasing news about a course catalog app based on course data from Workday, now that we have curriculum management live in Workday. We have some exciting news for our students in terms of their eligibility to become members of the Wellesley Free Library and enjoy the member benefits.

I want to roll back to the 90’s when this time used to be highly stressful for all of us. This was the time when the internet was catching up and students were beginning to bring their own computers to campus. Getting them connected to the network was a non-trivial task and the expectations were way too high. Connecting to network required that IT staff touch every computer and configure them to work properly. I am not kidding, but early on, by the time the last set of students were connected to the wired network, it was almost Thanksgiving holiday! And there was never enough bandwidth. You bought more and you don’t know where it went. We were shaping bandwidth and as you can imagine, this always resulted in some folks unhappy!

Now, students bring their own devices, many of which we are not even aware of, but connecting to the network is automatic, seamless and no one even thinks about it. We do feel that we can play a role in educating the students on appropriate use of social media, reliable information sources on the net etc. but the students seem so busy that it is proving hard to find time for this.

We still spend a lot of time and resources to prepare for the start of the academic year. At Wellesley, we have some major construction projects going on which introduces logistical difficulties with infrastructure such as phones and network connectivity. But more importantly, this also results in changes to classrooms which, we need to make sure are ready and functioning.

This year we will have some classes meeting in trailer classrooms. I went with some of my staff to look at how things are shaping up and these trailers are so cool! I don’t think this is where some of our challenges are. With two weeks to go, we saw some classrooms that seem unfinished and far from being ready for the first day of classes. I was assured that this is how it is every year, but, somehow things happen fast in the last couple of weeks. I am not sure why it has to be this way… The problem is that it gives very little time for my staff to go and set up the classroom technologies and check them out before the first day of classes.

On the library side, due to construction in the Science Center, the Science Collections have been moved to different locations both on campus and off campus. This means we need to help direct students and faculty to where to find the collections they are looking for.

We also have several changes to manage in terms of various software – Google Apps for Education will switch to the new GMail etc sometime between now and October. Though this may not appear major to some, it is still a change and a disruption we need to manage. Similarly, there will be changes to Workday (again, minor), Microsoft Office etc.

Needless to say, we are in the business of change management…