New Year arrived roughly the same way that it always does. The usual gatherings on New Year’s eve, watching Dick Clark and the Ball drop, toasting etc. etc. We had a rather quite party this year and settled down in the basement. A group of friends who wanted to surprise us came home to find no lights and wanted to head back. But just to make sure, they called and of course, we were home in the basement. They joined and the party was on with a fine bottle of Champagne.

One of the resolutions I made was not to send emails to my staff during the holiday break unless it was absolutely essential. I believe I kept that up! Yay!

Yes, like many out there, I made a few resolutions. Of course, they are personal ones and I am not going to discuss them here. These resolutions also have a very predictable path – you do what you resolved to do in January and then it goes downhill. I actually keep data on all of these and this path is evident. So, why even bother? Well, at least for a short period of time you are more disciplined about something.

What I want to talk about here is less of resolutions than some of the plans for the upcoming year at the College.We have several exciting projects lined up for the year. We have created a very workable template using many of the Google tools for use in teaching that we are calling “Google LMS”. We have a Google site template that brings together a nice set of underlying gadgets and links to Google Docs which we feel is a great alternative to Sakai in our environment. One of our excellent programmers has written Google API based programs that will automatically create Google groups for each class (and yes, the list will be updated during Drop/Add) which forms the basis of access control for the sites and documentation. Faculty can opt in for the Google LMS and the site template will be instantiated for them. How cool is that! You will be shocked to hear how quickly all of these were put together. Go Google Team!

Our Drupal team is hard at work trying to move data from Bluenog and Charlotte. Again, the work that has been accomplished in this area in such a short time is fantastic. Now, we have to apply all the infrastructure that has been built and do the actual transfers so we are on Drupal in the next few weeks. The last time I checked, everyone working on this project is still energized and smiling. I ran into someone a couple of days ago who told me how things are beginning to make sense with Drupal in terms of bringing together various tools that we are on now – she was talking about federating information from institutional repository into Drupal. And another was thrilled about the number of options the users can now have for their slideshows!

LTS staff have been working with the Curriculum Committee on depositing the undergraduate theses digitally in our institutional repository. We are ironing out the last minute details of communication, consent forms and all those logistical details. This will make our growing repository really rich. Along the same lines, we are in the preliminary stages of looking at Open Access policies that have been adapted by other Colleges Universities and begin the discussions. Some faculty members have shown keen interest in this topic and some of us are attending Sloan Summit II on this subject next week, sponsored by the Boston Library Consortium.

We have purchased a system called CrashPlan Pro which will allow us to backup the desktops and laptops of faculty and staff very nicely. We were going to expand the product we currently use for the servers, called Avamar, but due to cost and support considerations we have chosen this product. Our plan is to get 300 devices backing up to this system during the spring and then expand further.

We organized a meeting to discuss the emerging field of Digital Humanities which was well attended by faculty. This is an area where we will do more in the coming years. In addition, we will be launching a couple of major projects on the administrative systems side – iStrategy reporting and business intelligence system for student data and Nolij document management system for a few departments. In addition we will transition Meeting Maker calendars over to Google Calendar in the next couple of weeks.

The most exciting of all is a symposium series that we have planned for the spring called “Liberal Arts Learning in the Digital Age” where we plan to discuss and get feedback from the community on the future of Libraries and Technologies at the College. You will hear more about this soon!

So, as always, we have a lot going on and I have provided just a few samples. Our collective New Year Resolution should be to be an excellent service organization which will accomplish all the goals that were set for the year. Whereas I continue to hear the excellent job that we do in supporting our users, there are still several areas where we need to pay attention and elevate the reliability, ease of use and such things. Miles to go before we sleep!