One more weekend of Football is out of the way. I thought Patriots played a sloppy game and thanks to their defense and a missed field goal by the Ravens, they will be playing in Superbowl. The hype of the Patriots/Giants Superbowl rematch is on full swing and the whole Tom Coughlin/Bill Belichick relationship while they were both assistant coaches with the Giants is back in the limelight. Bill Belichick is a Wesleyan Alum, class of ’75, and has explained how he applies what he learned in College in NFL. I am really looking forward to an exciting Superbowl a couple of weeks from now. We have a big party planned in our house and the Giants fans amongst our visitors have back row seats with heat turned down and will be served warm beer while we in the front row seat will enjoy the warmth, better food and nice cold beer. For that one day, I don’t mind being called a bad host by a few!

As we begin the Spring semester, I am happy to talk about something that has been in the works for quite some time. It is a fact that technologies are coming at us at a rapid pace and they are changing the landscape in Higher Ed in ways that no one every anticipated. On the one hand, Higher Ed institutions have been the most influential in terms of research and development and through those, have affected tremendous changes in the world. On the other hand, they have also been very resistent to changes when it comes to teaching, learning and research, all for good reasons. As Larry Summers wrote in his NY Times piece recently “My predecessor as Harvard president, Derek Bok, famously compared the difficulty of reforming a curriculum with the difficulty of moving a cemetery.”  I believe that we need a strategy and an ongoing plan that  prepares the College for the changes in technologies and how it affects the Library and the College’s core academic mission. And we want to do develop this plan not in isolation, but in collaboration with the faculty, students, staff and the alumnae.

We have planned a symposium series for the Spring titled “Liberal Arts Learning in the Digital Age” to facilitate these conversations.

The details are still emerging because of the complex nature of what we are planning and you will be able to get all the up to date information here, starting in a couple of weeks.

The goal of the symposium series is to give the community an opportunity to chime in on how we should prepare ourselves to changes, rather than LTS making all these decisions. Of course, we have been working very well with the Advisory Committee on Library and Technology Policies, however, we want to reach out to the community at large and raise the awareness and collaboratively chart the course for the future. It is also the case that these conversations are not about nitty gritty technologies or what we call plumbing – I think we have solved those problems for the large part (granted that this is never a done deal, but we have a strategy and we are executing it well). This is all about how technology affects teaching, learning and research.

Broadly, our conversations will revolve around (and certainly not limited to):

• Libraries & Space – how do we adjust to the changing landscape of a traditional library and make it still a vibrant place for the community to come to for all information services. Many institutions have set up learning commons, information commons etc. as a way to address this.
• Discipline specific academic support – the notion that we can develop a uniform set of services and operational principles for the entire College (mainly because it is easy and less resource intensive) no longer works. The library and technology needs and requirements are highly discipline specific so we need to recognize that, plan and excel in delivering services accordingly. We would like to have conversations around each of the areas mentioned below as to how we can play an effective support role. These also provide very interesting interdisciplinary possibilities that we will explore. For each of these conversations, we plan to have faculty panels.
• Digital Humanities – Loosely defined as the application of digital technologies and techniques for use in the humanities,  this is an emerging field including textual analysis, digital storytelling, advanced uses of maps, gaming, virtual reality to highly quantitative techniques such as principal component analysis to analyze spoken words.
• Quantitative Analysis – Data analysis is extremely important in many areas of the curriculum, especially in the social sciences and the sciences. Proficiency in data analysis software and techniques is being viewed by many institutions as a core competency. How do we collaborate with the faculty so that we can play a role in offering support in the use of software and techniques as well as train students ahead of time in data analysis techniques so that they will be ready for summer research or internships right at the start.
• Scientific computing – High Performance scientific computing is carried out by many faculty in the College and we are already providing backend support.  Similar to the data analysis, this is an area where students will have a significant edge if properly trained  in High Performance computing techniques, software use and methodologies. How best can we partner with the fculty to make it happen is something we want to explore.
• Digital Media – As we know, this is an area that has exploded in the recent past with very interesting new developments and we want to explore how best to enhance the digital media technologies on campus and support them effectively.
• Digital Citizenship –  Another term that is widely used to capture a whole slew of things! Global leadership requires a certain level of information and digital literacy and  we want to discuss what we should do to prepare our students in these areas. We are working with Student Life and Center for Work and Service  and have a half a day long event which will rely heavily on student contributions.

We cannot simply begin conversations such as “How should the College prepare for the changes in Library and Technology?” with the community on a blank slate. So, based on what we feel are the most important aspects of the near term future, we have seeded these ideas and it is our expectation that other topics and contrarian view points will emerge during these symposia.

This is really exciting and I am thankful for the LTS staff who have been working to make this happen. It has not been easy! I am really looking forward to this and hopefully, at the end of the semester we will have a blueprint for an LTS strategic plan for the next few years.