Earlier this year, EDUCAUSE published Top 10 issues facing technology organizations. In an opinion piece, Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian at Temple University, posted a similar list for the Libraries “Top 10 Academic Library Issues for 2015 | From the Bell Tower“. These lists provide us a way to look at what we do and gauge how we are doing. Sometimes, it is pretty heartening to see that we are not the only ones facing these issues and other times you are glad that these are no longer “issues” for you.

It is not my intent to go over them one at a time, rather just highlight some of them.

You will notice that both lists talk about staff. In one case it is about hiring and retaining qualified staff and in the other dealing with the shifting responsibilities. We ourselves have been severely affected by retention issues. The technology market in the Boston area is flourishing and there are many more attractive opportunities out there than in the recent past, paying a lot more money than we can afford to. In our case, the retention issue has to do with some of the highly qualified staff moving on to better opportunities and we are struggling to find talented staff to fill their positions. In terms of library staff, we are lucky in that our staff are doing a fantastic job adjusting to the changes that are driving the libraries, be it increased use of digital assets, or digitization of our holdings etc.

I agree that if you are willing to discount the usual media hype about any news, MOOCs are not dead! We are continuing to be engaged in it. Our Introduction to Human Evolution MOOC had a very successful second run and is on its third run. The faculty who taught the other three MOOCs are excited to redo them based on what they have learned and I expect some revised versions of these courses to be rolled out in the Spring. We have had an excellent SPOC (Small Private Online Course) – an introductory course in Italian language and culture with which we engaged in some creative experimentation. This will be offered in very interesting ways, please wait for more news on this. And finally we will be announcing a Personal Finance MOOC that will be opened up in Jan/Feb 2016. It is an exciting modular course that I am sure many of us will benefit from. Our blended learning experimentations are hugely successful. In short, alternate forms of teaching and learning are being constantly being experimented on, where technology is playing a key role in supporting pedagogy.

Whether it is MOOCs or Open access policies or adopting open source software, we feel that we are engaged in all of these “open” efforts. This is a key aspect of our overall strategy and we hope to be engaged in these efforts.

Library space is a topic that we have been engaged in at the College for quite some time and there have been several interesting recent campus conversations on this subject including how the physical collections in the libraries relate to any attempts to redo the library space. I will write more about this in the near future. This whole process brought to the fore how our belief in transparency and governance process played out in these discussions in a very healthy way.

You have heard enough from me in my blog posts about our strategy around the cloud. I have submitted an opinion piece on this and I will provide a link to it once it is published. We are in the cloud and our plans are to move even more services to the cloud so that we can spend our time and effort to find interesting ways in which technologies can enhance teaching, learning and research as well as streamline business processes.

Financial resources are tight, but worrying about it and complaining about it will not bring more to the table. We are being very creative and have been able to do a lot more with what we have than ever before, for a variety of reasons. We have several great ideas that we continually present to the governance committees and to the senior administration and I will be able to write about some of the exciting future projects soon.

Data security is a continuing problem for all of us and we are doing the best we can to educate the community about the importance of following best practices in guarding information. This will be a continuing challenge for years to come. In this National CyberSecurity Awareness Month, we are sponsoring several information sessions and other activities to inform our users about a range of things.

On balance, the top issues that you see in both the posts referenced above, apply to us and I feel that we are handling them reasonably well, though some are more challenging than the others.