It is true that when you are enjoying what you do, the time goes by fast! We are engaged in several major initiatives in Library and Technology Services and several of us are also involved in many other campus initiatives and projects.

Some of our colleagues have played a very important part in assisting with the Science Center Renovation as well as in supporting the reaccreditation activities.  This includes participation in multiple meetings regarding technology in the renovated spaces, be it faculty and staff offices or classrooms as well as provide data and narratives to those who are leading the reaccreditation preparations.

Not everyone is on the same page about wires in new spaces. Frankly, in our minds, we should take advantage of renovation to run conduits and run fiber even if there no immediate use because, in the end, that will be cheaper than scrambling to do this later. We have no idea what the needs of the scientists are in terms of computing and data access and network plays a very important part in all of this. For certain class of problems, wireless doesn’t simply cut it! However, budget and cost considerations are constant point of discussion during such a major project and our staff are doing a great job given how difficult things can be.

Several of the staff also played a major role in assisting with the move of the Science Library collections. They are distributed to other campus locations and remote sites. So far so good because almost 7 months later, we have not heard many complaints.

We are also in the final stages of transitioning to Workday Student. We are validating all the data that have been loaded while configuring Workday to take advantage of many new features that we intend to implement – Academic Progress Report, Academic Requirements (for degree completion), Academic Planning. We understand that these require cultural shift for adoption, but we believe that they will be extremely useful and over a period of time the students and faculty will adopt them. We plan to move to Workday Student in May, though it will be production ready in March.

There are still lot to be done between now and March in terms of integrations. We will get them done. As I am fond of saying “I am not worried!”

We also did several enhancements to Workday HCM and Finance which we have been using for a while. We will be rolling out Workday Recruitment for administrative staff soon and we have done a lot of cleanup in terms of configurations and business processes. This work will continue.

We have also begun the implementation of Affinaquest for advancement. Our plan is to go live in September 2019. Along with that we are also looking at a solution for alumnae engagement and are pretty close to choosing one.

We have rolled out OnBase document management solution to replace Nolij and slowly transitioning various offices to this. It has a nice integration with Workday that we want to explore and use. Documents stored in OnBase should be accessible from Workday with appropriate security.

Organizationally, we have several new colleagues who have joined us. We are facing incredibly difficult time hiring for vacant positions primarily because of abundance of jobs in Boston area who are attracting talents for a range of reasons. Despite this, we continue to strive for and offer the best possible services to the community.

We have a small group who have been discussing some ideas that will be used to write our next Strategic Plan. Our goal is to publish something in February…

Our Special Collections received support from the Friends of the Library  to enter data about approximately 100 incunabula (books printed in Europe before the end of 1500) into the the internationally sponsored database known as Material Evidence in Incunabula, or MEI. The work began in early December and will continue.

We are also searching for a Project Archivist to assist in processing several boxes of unprocessed materials in the Archives. This was recognized as an important area by the senior administration and we believe that processing of important College records will assist us during the upcoming Sesquicentennial of the College in 2020.

So, there is a LOT going on and it is exciting. I will traveling in India for the next few days and be back to assist with all the different initiatives and contribute where I can.

Happy Holidays to everyone and a Happy and Prosperous New Year!!!