It was such a gorgeous day on thursday, Oct 11, 2012 &  I took a short walk around Lake Waban. It was so refreshing. I counted the time towards Wellesley’s Walktober. Unfortunately we found out that only three of us signed up for our team and a team means 4 to 10 people. So, I can count the walking towards my personal commitment only and not towards a team competition. Since I don’t need this as a personal nudge (I am pretty diligent about my exercise anyways), I am not going to keep the Walktober data up to date.

Enjoyed watching the vice presidential debate last night and may end up watching the Orioles vs Yankees this evening. It was amazing to see Twitter and Facebook filled with instant feedback from so many people during the debate. Whereas it is great to see how these technologies are helping such instant feedback, most data are rather predictable. What is great is how you instantly see how many others independently are posting similar feelings towards what is said or done.

As I was walking around the lake yesterday, I was beginning to think about all the different things that are going on in LTS. Despite the fact that we wanted this year to be a year of stability because we had gone through significant changes during the past year, I am simply amazed at all the things that are going on. I will stick to my practice of not naming individuals in the descriptions below 🙂

I am so happy with everything that is happening on Drupal end of things. The community members are feeling great about the software and the ease with which they are able to update the information. We are doing some really nice work collectively in terms of extending the capabilities of Drupal and Monster Menus. Of course, several of our users are pushing the envelope by requesting new modules and a level of independence to work with the software. We are accommodating these as much as possible.

Now that almost all of LTS in under one roof, we are beginning to see more interactions than before (we could always have more). I try to drop in whenever possible. I went up to the third floor a couple of days ago to discuss the nuances of a home grown Identity Management System that is in the works (another thing to be proud of!). We discussed that and a lot more, like the potency of the spiced rum from Grenada and a potent whisky of sorts from China (with a lot of X’s). I am sure there is a connection to IDM that is yet to be discovered. Seriously, the Wellesley IDM will again introduce enormous efficiencies in comparison to how we currently manage accounts. I know there are doubters, but, wait and see!

We have a lot of interest from our faculty about an effort being jointly led by LTS staff and the faculty around a Book Studies Initiative – “”Book studies is fueled by the intellectual energy and excitement released when a student’s reading and classroom study collide with her hands-on work in fields such as book design, bookbinding, paper- and printmaking, publishing, printing, libraries, and special collections.” We had a successful gathering of faculty for a workshop during the summer and things are moving forward. There is a talk on 10/24 by Martin Antonetti, Curator of Rare Books at Smith College in the Library Lecture Room. Please stop by.

And if you don’t know where that is, Google Maps can help you if you have a Droid phone. Locate the Clapp Library in Google Maps and you will now see details about the building including controls to navigate to different floors in Clapp. Another project we collaborated on Google with, for interior mapping. After some initial hiccups, it is getting a lot better and will continue on that path whereby information about the books and journals in the stacks will be identified by call numbers. Oh, by the way, now you can look up where the men’s room in Clapp are located!

Our PHP framework for application development has reached a whole new level. We received so many accolades for various applications we have developed for the functional offices, specifically the checklist application for the first years (which had the largest adoption since it was introduced and the biggest complaint we had was that the offices were not used to having such large numbers fill out the checklist in such a short time – not the worst place to be in) including the automation of the placement of first years in writing classes as well as first year seminars. In addition, we have newly developed or enhanced previous versions of several PHP apps and many are in the works. We also revamped the way academic departments submit new schedules for the following semester which again made it simpler for the users. The general principle here is that we rely on data from the authoritative sources (such as Banner or 25Live) but the web apps are written using a framework that presents the navigation and other look & feel in a consistent manner and is linked to the portal, thereby avoiding the need to login again. By dividing up the responsibility for data delivery by those who are good at it from the application developers, we have been able to achieve tremendous efficiencies. I should mention that an app being developed for the agenda committee assignments using the jquery drag and drop is really slick!

We are also involved in several digitization projects to share valuable works in our archives with the rest of the world. There are also plans to participate in a national effort led by (I believe) the Digital Public Library of America to digitize civil war era letters and other artifacts. Our archives has about 300 such letters that may become part of this effort whereby we will help digitize and share it with the project and the transcription will be crowdsourced. We are also collaborating with a faculty and her students on a digital humanities project to do a mashup of timelines, maps, digitized letters etc. Exciting stuff. Talking about exciting stuff, you will hear of a really exciting event, scheduled for January 2013, being organized jointly by LTS and the Friends of the Library (FOL).

Some of our staff have successfully set up servers for use in Amazon’s VPC (Virtual Private Cloud). What this simply means is that we can provision any number of servers for various purposes without having to purchase them and care for them. Instead, we pay for use and data transfer across the network. It takes a few clicks and a few minutes (I am not joking!) and of course, a credit card, to provision a machine that you want. By setting up  VPC, you make these machines appear as a part of your own network, though they are virtual servers in Amazon’s data centers that once were used to sell Harry Potter books! This is very very exciting and I will watch this closely as we move forward. By the way, I was not supposed to talk about it yet! Oops, too late.

We will be doing “paperless” admissions process this year where all the reading of applications and other administrative activities take place digitally. Frankly, the speed at which we got this accomplished is something that we should be very proud of! And we have four classes fitted with SMART boards that faculty in general are very happy with. They are being used in very interesting ways – to store and share the “handwritten” notes on these boards, as a second projection device and to click and drag program snippets in a programming class.

This is exactly what I had in mind and verbalized to some of my staff “stability doesn’t mean we are going to simply sit here and watch the community use all of the things we implemented last year. This will be a time to let our creative juices flow so we can do things that causes least interruptions to the end users, but still provides services to them”. PHP framework as an example – we have established that this model works and the community is used to the way these apps work. Now, cranking up and producing more and more apps will not be seen as a change or disruption, instead it will be welcome. And believe me, there is ample evidence that there is a lot of demand for it.

Finally, I have to mention this. I had told a few of my staff that “I keep hearing how bad our registration system is. Wouldn’t it be great if we can do it in a way that the students & faculty want?” The reaction was one of disbelief “Why would we want to do something like that?” As you are well aware, my philosophy is that unless it is absolutely necessary, software systems should not dictate how we should conduct business, especially when our constituents and not the software developers, are the subject matter experts. All I wanted was options. If – and that is a big IF – we are asked to support a different way of doing registration, can we do it? In a nutshell, I wanted to know if we manage to do everything about the “registration” using data from Banner but in our own way, can we then register the students in Banner through some batch process. I have always believed that this is doable, but I have been patiently waiting and persisting. I was so happy to hear this morning that one of our staff may have found a way to do this! Way to go!

Even if we don’t redo registration, there are many uses for this, including registering the first years into a First Year Seminar and Writing class.

This is just a sample of all the great things that are going on. We really are hopping and keep the momentum up! I am sure there are a lot of other exciting things that are going on that I may have inadvertently omitted. I apologize for any such omissions. Add them through comments.