Yesterday (Sep 3) was the first day of classes at Wellesley. As far as LTS is concerned, we seem to be off to another good start. We have been able to see that most of the students have connected their computers to the network. Our students brought more Macs than Windows machines – 67% Macs 33% Windows so far. We also should have a pretty good handle on the Smartphones that they are bringing in. My guess is that the Droids will be more than iPhones based on what I saw during the orientation. No, I was not spying on them – we exempt them from Cisco NAC, so the students were bringing theirs in for that!

Some of us also met with the new faculty and presented to them the range of services we support and fielded a lot of questions. They were duly impressed and a couple compared our support to the institutions they come from & mentioned how impressed they were about our faculty support. I also heard from two parents who mentioned how clear all instructions were on LTS website! LTS staff should consider this as an endorsement of the hard and creative work that they do! Way to go!

This is the time when, if we had a device to measure the collective enthusiasm, hope, and happiness, it would be at the highest. It is in the air and you can feel it. It also reminded me of the irreversible process called aging – several new faculty are pretty close in age to my older son 🙁

We have our general plan for the year all sketched out. Now it is execution time. Our focus will be on Digital Scholarship on the academic side. We have some exciting projects lined up for the early part of the year where staff from research and instructional support and library collections will be collaborating. We expect our special collections use to be pretty high and we are glad to see a strong collaboration between special collections and archives, the first step of which is the merged reading room.

We are also excited about the WellesleyX classes and the support we are providing. Our staff are learning a lot from these experiences and collaboration with edX.

On the administrative side, we will be rolling out the data analytics solution for reporting student and finance-related data. These projects, especially the student module implementation, are very complex and I very happy that we are where we are. It is also our intention to move more business processes to online and use our document imaging system, Nolij, for storing scanned images. We will be doing the paperless admissions for the second time this year and we are working on some process modifications for that. The Checklist for First years was a major success! We are working on several other exciting business process enhancement projects.

On the infrastructure side, we have a brand new backend hardware for the campus wide network. We invested in quality hardware with modern networking capabilities, replacing some that have been here far too long – 7 or more years. We will continue to push our strategy to be primarily wireless. Another major network implementation, the removal of Cisco NAC and an administrative firewall, which we were hoping to do this summer, has been postponed. It seems to be very complicated and we need time and support.

We are also going to be paying extra attention to more effective communication as well as metrics. As a first step, we will be asking for feedback on our services – having an iPad at the helpdesk and service desk in the library as well as on the LTS home page. Please fill it out and let us know how we can improve our services.

Looking forward to another productive and exciting year.