Happy New Year everyone!
Preserving scholarly works, history of the world, countries all the way down to individual institutions has been happening for a very long time in very different ways. The decision to preserve something for the long haul always lags the initial creation of content. Generally, the value of the content and the intent to preserve it is based on the impact of the content, which takes some time. Libraries are the institutions that make decisions on what to preserve, how to preserve and how to make them available. This is a lot of hard work on the part often led by the special collections and archives in the libraries.
But, in the last 20 to 25 years, things have changed dramatically thanks to the internet, advances in technologies and predominantly the content are born-digital. And since the wide adoption of various social media, digital content has exploded exponentially. This applies to written text, audio as well as videos. These advances have democratized the content creation and distribution like never before, which, like everything else, has its positives and negatives. Of course the advanced technology allows for easy preservation and generally all content creators take advantage and preserve pretty much everything they create, although often not up to the standards that guarantee long-term preservation which libraries need to meet. This poses enormous challenges to the libraries and there has been some excellent work in this area led by Library of Congress and you can read about it in detail here. I just want to touch on some of the technical aspects of it here.
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We expected to be somewhat back to normal during the Fall semester and it went by the wayside in late summer, so we prepared to continue a lot of what we did in the previous year in terms of masking, social distancing, limited interactions on campus and continued testing. Just when things started looking good in October, things went south. As you can see, after a lull, it shot up right after Thanksgiving and has stayed there. This is not unique to Wellesley, it is affecting so many other Higher Eds as well as it seems to be a national trend.
As if this is not enough to drain your energy, we had a couple of phishing attacks on campus this past week. Despite our best attempts to educate the community about protections against such attempts, several fell for this. These things take away valuable time for many of us to clean up!
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It is Thanksgiving week already. Time just files… It is time to be thankful for a lot of things in life. I will not do justice by touching on everyone and everything, but I am going to give it a try, not in any particular order.
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Most of you know that I continue to be an avid developer. I have also expressed our organizational plan moving forward – low or no code. We are a small institution and have limited staff resources. However, we have realigned our resources in ways that we are still getting a lot done. How? We have shed a lot of the old ways of doing business in ll areas of LTS and in the area of code development, we are coding far less than before. We have an opportunity to do even less with advances in technologies.
I always say that our academic computing colleagues are great examples of those who find strategic uses of technologies to support teaching, learning and research and in predominent number of cases they do not code! They are experts at researching various existing or emerging technologies to see how they fit our institutional culture and practices to help adopt them and support them. The corresponding model in administrative system is business analysts. They are experts who understand the “business” (such as HR, Finance, Registrar, Student Financial Services etc) and try to research how major administrative systems we already have can be used to improve the various business processes and work with the offices to implement them.
This is where tools such as Extend can assist.
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It was about 18 months ago that the college decided to go fully remote as a result of the COVID crisis. That was not an easy decision at that time but the senior leadership and an expanded group of administrative staff who formed the operation team came to that conclusion and quickly started pivoting to the various action items that would make remote learning successful.
As the year developed, we started gaining confidence that the fall of 2021 is likely to be a different semester than the last year and therefore preparations were underway to make this an on campus experience for everyone. However, as we approached the beginning of summer it became very clear that the fall is not going to be what we all thought it was going to be.
The Delta variant was becoming more pervasive in the United States than anyone had imagined and it was becoming a major factor in us having to decide what to do next. The college instituted mandatory submission of proof of vaccination for all the students and all the faculty and staff who will be on campus on a regular basis. Because we were going to have all on campus classes and all students on campus the college also decided to recall the remote work policy for administrative staff. However the senior administration had developed a plan that accommodated up to 2 days a week of remote work for administrative staff to whom that applies.
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sometime agoIt finally happened! I picked up the phone and called Comcast and said I only want their internet service and no cable TV. They did the usual thing of passing me around to different department a couple of times, but to my surprise I was connected to a woman who was pleasant and willing to help.
I am not sure if I wrote earlier about getting out of landline phone, but I finally brought myself to doing it . My only reason for keeping it was ADT security system which still needed a land line, but they had recently graduated to using Cell connections as well as WiFi and once I got that taken care of, I called to cancel. Comcast tried to convince me to keep it because it didn’t cost much etc. etc. but I stood my ground and got out of it. What a relief! No more spam calls waking us up in the middle of the night etc. (yes, I did sign up for nomorobo etc but they had their own limitations). And we have been just fine with receiving calls on our cell phones.
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This summer is turning out to be far better than last. This time last year, several of us at the College were working overtime – starting with decision making on how the Fall semester will shape up, working on modifying systems for changes (summer needed to be rerun from on campus to remote classes, Fall needed to be reconfigured for Term systems), and gearing up for COVID testing starting in August. Each of this was a monumental effort involving so many faculty and staff and looking back, it was amazing how much we were able to accomplish together! This year, it is understandably different for the better.
When we developed our strategy document in the 2012 time frame, the focus was on these – Expanding Access, Strengthening Partnerships, Providing a Scalable, Sustainable & Agile Infrastructure & Mitigating Risks. We have done extremely well in following up on all these goals. A new strategic plan that we hope to begin working on shortly will retain most of these overarching goals, but what is underneath will change. We are waiting for the College’s Strategic Plan to move to the next step of implementation so that we can line up ours with that. Accomplishing the stated goals in an environment that is fast paced requires prioritization and willingness to change and let go of some of the things that are close to our hearts. And this is where the Low code/No code strategy is extremely important.
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Our drive from Google Map. We drove through the southern path and returned through the Northern one.
One of the days during the 2nd week in April, I happened to walk into a conversation between our elder son and my wife. Our son was going to get his second dose of vaccination and was planning on a long road trip to visit some national parks. At the end of it all, the trip turned into one that my wife and I would also accompany him. Our younger one had work to do so he couldn’t. All three were fully vaccinated by then and we were excited. Our son had it all planned and it was supposed to be for a couple of weeks, so there was not much for me to do.
We love such road trips and visits to the parks. We have done them a few times. In 1983 my wife and I (poor grad students) drove from NY City down to Florida and back, stopping on the way at all sorts of interesting places and staying with friends or Motel 6! Similarly, we did a trip in 1984 going from NY City to California and back over 5 weeks. We saw a few events at the LA Olympics that year. Subsequently, we had flown to Denver with the kids and drove around some of the parks in Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota etc. and a few times to California and drove around in CA, AZ, NV etc. They are just a lot of fun.
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On that fateful day, Wed Mar 17th, I was so tired of telling my Mac “Try the OS update tomorrow”, I gave in and pressed the button to run the update! I have so much respect for and trust in Apple in terms of user experience that I expected such a major upgrade to proceed smoothly. It turned out to be a mini disaster.
It took forever to download, because it is a pretty large one. Then it began installing and long story short, after an hour and a half, nothing was happening. No error messages. I was using my phone to attend to emails in the meantime and looking up the various fora for Big Sur upgrades. So many complaints, I wish I had checked them before I began…
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We all were following the story of the new virus creating havoc in China in the news and social media early last year, but, it didn’t hit us as something that will turn our own personal and professional lives upside down until late February and early March. At the College, President Johnson convened a group of us to think through various likely scenarios and how best to respond to each. As a physician and public health expert, she was able to provide authoritative information based on her understanding of the seriousness of the issue and in consultation with some of the world’s experts in this area. It became clear quickly that we had to make some tough choices for the sake of the health and safety of the community.
Despite the various scenario planning, by the 11th of March, it was quickly becoming clear that we were trending on closing the College and going remote. The final decision was made on the 12th, a year ago today, and the president sent the painful message to the College Community where she said:
Up until this morning, we had planned to continue classes through next week and begin spring break on time. However, in light of the newest information about the escalation in the number of cases and increased risk to our students, we have decided to accelerate our timeline.
- Spring break will begin on Monday, March 16, and remote instruction will begin on March 30. Remote instruction will continue for the rest of the semester.
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