Research and Instructional Support

LITS Annual Report 2002-2003

Introduction:

This year has been one of transition and growth. Much of the year was spent covering our basic services while exploring new ideas about collaboration and ways that the work of librarians and IT consultants overlap. We began the year under the premise that the two groups, Reference and Curriculum Support & Repair would merge. These two self-managed teams would become a new entity - Research & Instructional Support.

As the school year began, we launched into our usual round of training, service point coverage, and one on one research and technical support. We also began our search for a Director and an Information Technology Consultant for the new RIS team.

Over the spring, we began to explore what it meant to be "RIS" and held a brief ½ day retreat to collect ideas and establish common ground. This work, while incomplete, helped us to consider redesigning our work. It was only a beginning, the more difficult task of actually reworking our processes, services, and physical resources will take much of our time this year.

Finally, in conjunction with the "usual" work of the year and the transitory work of our merge, we even managed to launch a few new services for our customers. As we continue to analyze our processes, collect background data, and compare to market trends we must continue to strive for improved processes, innovative solutions and responsive services.

It has been a wonderful and interesting and BUSY year! As I reviewed the information about the work of the past year, I was constantly reminded of how talented and dedicated this team is. As we move forward with Owen Ellard at the helm, we can expect even greater things. It has been a pleasure working with Reference and Curriculum Support & Instructional Technology as they become Research & Instructional Support and I look forward to our continued progress this year!

Statistical Snapshot:

· Service Points

• Staffed the Reference Desk for 60 hours / week during the academic year.
• Staffed the Faculty Resource Center for 10 hours / week.
• Staffed the Help Desk for 7 hours / week.

· Training

• Taught 35 workshops for faculty & staff with 127 participants.
• Taught 96 library instruction classes (25 with our wireless classroom!).
• Oversaw 86 student-to-student workshops with 618 participants.
• Gave 19 tours or orientation sessions

· Reference

• Met with 98 individual students doing higher level research
• Handled 4200 reference queries, ¼ of which involved research help.
• Fielded 1300 technical support questions for public computers

· CSIT

• Increased courses on WebCT to approximately 10% of the total course offerings (fall 2003)
• Hired and managed 12 "Swebtech" lab consultants for higher level project support and workshops.
• Developed and refined a 'collaborative writing tool' for use in WebCT.
• Acquired and installed upgraded versions of New Media and 10-12 Academic specific software for public and departmental machines. (~200 machines)
• Managed Multimedia 10 multimedia (curricular development) projects each summer and revamped process and offerings to increase to 14 projects this academic year.

Merging Our Work:

Over the course of the past summer, the Reference staff became more fluent in WebCT and spent unassigned time in the FRC. Working as helpers or 'sweepers' became a common task and I'm pleased to hear that Owen is expanding on that concept by moving more to a 'team teaching' approach rather than a 'teacher / helper' model.

We also began holding weekly team meetings to discuss those topics around space, hiring, and the merge. As the new year begins, these meetings will become the de facto meeting in lieu of separate CSIT and Reference team gatherings. Likewise, we are eliminating references to the separate groups in signage, email, and other areas, referring to the group as solely RIS.

Staffing Changes:

This group has managed to sustain service levels despite a somewhat turbulent year in staffing. We began the year with the hire of a 'temp', Rob Primmer who turned out to be quite a find! With an extraordinary eye for design and a calm, easy going manner - he quickly provided backup support that enable the team to participate in the other hiring processes and 'merge' discussions.

Next, we were able to find Shaoping Moss who possesses a unique blend of library and technology skills. With little direction, she quickly began to assert herself and jumped right in to supporting our language faculty.

In the meantime, Kathleen Norton who had been working in Reference and as Director of Collection Development left the team on parental leave in January. During her absence, her duties were absorbed the existing team members. Upon her return, it was decided that she would continue to sit a shift at the Reference Desk, but that she would do so in the same capacity as other faculty liaisons.

Janet Ewing graciously agreed to adjust her part-time schedule to a full-time schedule to help cover services in Kathleen's absence and that has continued even as Kathleen has returned.

Aime Degrenier followed suit and left us in May to begin her parental leave as the mother of twins. She is expected to return in late September.

Raven Fonfa also departed in May - leaving us to return to her family in Las Vegas, Nevada. We will miss her and wish her all the best. We have hired Erica Glenn on a temporary replacement basis for the fall semester of 2003 and will seek a permanent replacement over the course of the fall.

Finally, Owen Ellard has joined LITS as the Director of RIS. His blend of technical skill, knowledge of librarianship, and management style are just the tools we need to continue the important work we've begun as a team. I look forward to helping him turn his innovative ideas into reality.

Conference Attendance & Staff Development

Staff from RIS attended the following conferences and training sessions this year:

• ACRL Annual Conference
• NERCOMP Annual Conference
• Learning Objects (Special Interest Group - NERCOMP)
• New Media Center Annual Conference
• "Hopkins 401" - gathering of IT professionals from regional campuses
• Bioinformatics
• DSpace Demonstration & Conference
• SLA
• ALA Conference - Toronto
• NITLE - Arab Culture

And of course, we all took a little road trip to Wellesley to see their renovation and learn about their support models.

New Services & Resources

• Investigated commercial aggregators of electronic full-text journals and added access to EBSCO's Academic Search Premier - containing over 3000 e-journal titles.
• Explored Ingenta's Document Delivery system to increase "on demand" access to individual journal articles.
• Added 20 computers to the Reading Room (previously there were 8)
• Added leisure book collection (audio and print)
• Incorporated library instruction within Chemistry 101 as part of the curriculum redesign project with Mary Glackin, Sandy Ward, Sean Decatur and Ed Fitzgerald.
• More aggressive outreach to students engaged in independent study.
• Collaborated with Networking to install and configure EZ Proxy, providing access to domain specific resources.
• Participated with the 5 Colleges in the acquisition, installation and configuration of SFX (with the Metalib counterpart program to be installed this year.)
• Moved and setup LITS Training room and the Video Resource Center (VRC) into the Dwight corridor.
• Successfully migrated molecular modeling software from SGI stations to a Macintosh units running OS X. This maximizes available stations for day-to-day use by students.
• Developed a web site covering adaptive technologies for our user community.
• Migrated 35000 images in the Art slide library to a new version of the IRIS software.
• Enhanced / reworked new faculty orientation sessions.
• Proactively sought to assist the Communications and Web Design teams in training the user community to use the "Mount Holyoke Identity".

The Future:

As we move into the new year, Owen will continue the work of merging RIS. Developing a shared vision of providing the best support for teaching and learning and remaining vigilant to the needs of our users will be our main goals.

Along the way, we are developing assessment tools and gathering statistics. Using these, along with the assessments for the plan for 2010, we expect to adjust our processes to further improve our operation.

We expect our new offices to be fully renovated and operational by the spring semester. The physical proximity of colleagues will only enhance our work and communication.

It will be another exciting, stimulating, and busy year!