I attended a gathering of several senior managers at the College as a part of a Leadership development effort. The topic of discussion is managing change. We had a very interesting meeting and discussed the challenges everyone faces in trying to affect changes at the institution. It was great to hear the different perspectives on the same issue. This also provided us an opportunity to interact with colleagues with whom we may not interact in the same fashion. I learned a few things about what is going on at the College.
It was apparent that each of us, because of a variety of reasons, including the position we occupy and the areas of our responsibilities, bring a different view point to change management. Since LTS needs to deal with change on a regular basis, I wanted to share how we tend to implement changes.
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We heard from Kyle Courtney yesterday (Oct 22, 2014) about “Fair Use and Copyright in the Digital Era”. Kyle is a terrific and engaging speaker. I had spoken to him earlier when I had questions regarding the use of copyrighted material in MOOCs.
Bottom line – there are no simple answers and use your discretion in interpreting a complex set of laws based on your risk tolerance. As we have seen in the Georgia State University e-reserves case (Cambridge University Press et al v Patton et al), even the courts can’t seem to decide one way or the other! For all the resources related to this case, click here.
The core issue is that faculty rely on content created by many others for their teaching. The content comes from a variety of sources and from all over the world. Copyright laws provide the general framework for the appropriate use of the content, however, there are considerable variations from one country to the other. Copyright protection is in effect the moment content is created and stays with the author. Duration of the copyright is pretty complex subject matter and you can read more about it here. When an author publishes content, generally, they transfer the copyright to the publisher. This results in enormous inconveniences for the use of published work including the fact that for certain uses of the published work, the original author himself/herself need to seek publisher’s permission. Open access policy is beginning to address this issue somewhat in case of scholarly articles. According to this, the author exercises his/her rights to the content in addition to granting rights to the publisher.
As always, technology is ahead of policies and this issue is not an exception. The explosion in born digital content and the use of digital materials in teaching, learning and research has brought to light the lack of clarity of current copyright laws which are still catching up.
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Hope you enjoyed July 4th! As many of you know, I was born in Sri Lanka and lived there for 16 years as an Indian at heart. I moved to India and spent 6 years going to College. I then moved here 35 years ago, studied and settled happily. (OK, now you know how old I am!) All three countries celebrate independence day in grand manner. By the way, I feel bad for the occupiers (in all the three countries I lived, the British were the occupiers) because they don’t have Independence day as a holiday. In Sri Lanka and India, when I was growing up, the Independence day celebrations were a big deal. In the ’60s and the ’70s you still had many who directly experienced the struggle for independence and remembered the sacrifices of their own and others, and the celebrations were grand. As the time passes, the reason for celebrations change, naturally.
Some of us will be making the long trek to Middlebury College next week for a gathering of staff from six colleges – Amherst, Brandeis, Middlebury, Wellesley, Wesleyan and Williams. About 10-11 years ago, the leaders of IT from Wesleyan, Brandeis and Williams (WBW) decided to bring staff from each organization together for an informal gathering and exchange of ideas. It was a lot of fun and productive. Some of us have moved on to other institutions and wanted to start this expanded group. I will write about this meeting next week.
Based on what I heard at the CLAC annual conference last week and the agenda for next week’s gathering I see that many of us are really worried about our dependence on a variety of things. We seek independence and flexibility that may or may not exist and may come at great costs that we don’t have the luxury to fund.
There used to be a time, not too long ago, when the hardware costs were what the technology leaders in higher ed worried about. Whether it is acquiring mainframes from IBM or DEC or subsequently the mini computers in the late ’80s, these were major investments, that helped exclusively the business processes in the institutions. The early ’90s saw major disruptions when the personal computer revolution came about, and institutions were caught off guard on many fronts. Many institutions were not prepared budgetarily to fund computers for faculty and staff but most importantly, there were not enough staff to support them. The sad truth is that these “personal computers” were developed for “personal use” and the internet changed the game and the transition was ugly. The dissatisfaction amongst the faculty and staff was at an all time high and many leadership in IT organizations changed.
After 10, 15 years, we have forgotten all of these because hardware is cheap and has been commoditized. These two factors has given us the independence and flexibility we want. If a vendor does not provide me what I want, I have many others to turn to. Besides, I can swap hardware A with B with such ease these days, there is very little incremental cost to be able to do it. Virtualization is another huge game changer, which makes it incredibly easy to divide a single physical server into multiple virtual server. So, in general, we are satisfied with the hardware landscape.
The other major area that is vexing for us is software. You have heard so much from me on this, I will keep it brief. Basically, it is a huge mess for certain software and there seems to be no relief in sight. In the CLAC meeting, when someone suggested a possible collaboration amongst colleges to run ERP (eg. Banner) jointly as a way to reduce costs, a seasoned CIO quipped “I don’t see that happening in my lifetime”. I am a bit more optimistic than that. Most of our frustration stems from the fact that despite the fact that these software cost us a boat load of money, they don’t do what we want them to do. I do understand the struggle that the software vendors face in trying to satisfy thousands of institutions each with different expectations, but when I pay annually 4-6 times the full-tuition for students, I expect a lot more and I don’t necessarily care how the vendors accomplish this.
This is precisely why the fiercely independent persona in me loves open source. Of course, it has its own “dependence” – the worldwide community that develops these software and the fear of the unknown. What if the community stops caring about them and stops developing them? Indeed, it is a real issue, but think about it – it is “open” for a reason. If the software stops being supported, you have access to everything you put into it and you can chart the course at that point. This is next to impossible in case of commercial software. Moving from one ERP system to another is so prohibitively costly that with very few bold exceptions, no one dares to even think about it. Did I say I will keep it brief? OK, I will stop.
In similar vein, the journal publishers tie our hands big time. We don’t have much of a leverage to influence the rise in costs. Open access policies and open access journals are beginning to provide us with some much needed flexibility and independence.
The two items I discussed above are at the institutional level. Due to increased awareness and knowledge of technologies, every member of the community seeks technology independence in some sense. The whole BYOD (bring your own device) or the variance in terms of the operating systems and software that everyone wants to use poses new issues. Whereas we want to encourage these to a large extent, because this is essential for creativity and inquiry. However, we need to also think about certain boundaries.
Democracies are successful because independence is combined with certain constraints such as the laws, rules and regulations or else there could be total anarchy. Not everyone may necessarily agree with all the rules and regulations, but the expectations are that all citizens follow these for the collective good. The same way, we, as an organization, with consultation with the advisory committees such as the Advisory Committee on Library and Technology Policies and the president’s cabinet, create the boundaries and try our best to enforce them, all for the collective good of everyone. Of course, not everyone always agrees with what we do. We try our best to accommodate as many variations as possible and try to explain why we do what we do. I prefer to meet with those who feel that our decisions are adversely affecting their ability to conduct research or business.
As someone said “It is hard to hate someone in person”. And I would add “especially if the person makes sense”, even if we disagree.
I had a very interesting couple of weeks. On Friday, Feb 1, I had to present to the Board of Trustees a brief outline of the technology planning. The hard part of this is that you have a short time to communicate effectively what you are planning to do. With help from a few colleagues who helped massage my presentation, I got that done. Then I gave a talk on “Milking Google for All it is Worth” to faculty and staff on the following Monday. It was well attended and I will write about it in my next blog post. The most satisfying thing about the talk was a couple of followup emails from the attendees on how they already applied some of what they learned. This was followed by Academic Council on Wed. where I had to answer a question regarding what we are doing about the Library Collections Safety (which I will write about also), but the council voted to support the Open Access Legislation – a HUGE step for us as a College.
Then of course, the Blizzard struck. It was not bad at all because we did not lose power. Then, who cares? Really… We have a person who promptly clears our driveway and our roads were cleaned reasonably well. I watched a total of 5 Tamil movies while it was snowing. Life was good.
I heard a speaker during my recent visit to Google mention the Procrustes bed (which I explain below) and I thought “This is perfect for what I have been talking about” – how the technologists always produce technologies that they want us to fit in!
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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. (more…)
