proxy woes & ILS successes

It is 68 degrees today. I know I keep talking about how beautiful it is … wind blowing … blue blue water all around us … no humidity … but I feel the need to mention it yet again … We crossed the prime meridian (0 degrees longitude) last night, sometime around 2:30 AM. I wasn’t up for the event. We’re currently at 32 degrees, 28 minutes latitude; .05 degrees, 48 minutes longitude, moving at a speed of 18.2 knots. All according to my cabin television which provides this info. to me moment-by-moment.

The Archbishop spoke at Global Studies this morning. It was very rah-rah: yay for students who can change the world; yay for students who boycotted for company disinvestment from South Africa back in the 80s & 90s (which we did at Mount Holyoke, we boycotted Coca-Cola & the College purchased only Pepsi products), yay for the work that students are doing now for the causes of poverty and racial inequality. But, I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t more substance in his speech today -- either about his personal experiences or about the state of the country now in 2006. He talked a bit about the Truth & Reconciliation Commission and how South Africa was able to keep from having a bloodbath with the transfer of power, but he didn’t talk in any great personal detail. I wanted more … of him … somehow … (and I realize that’s awfully selfish on my part), rather than rah-rah for the students. But, of course, he was primarily talking to the students and that’s obviously what he felt they needed to hear. He spoke for an hour without notes and he’s funny and he laughs at himself and he’s very hard not to adore. Tomorrow will be a Q & A. I hope the students ask good questions.

Mixed library news today. Last night, Mark at ITC fixed my Connexion-connection problem through the proxy server. Last night, that was lovely & I was very happy. Today, we couldn’t access the proxy server at all -- from anywhere. I’m not quite sure what’s up. I reported it early this morning, but we’re 6 hours ahead of EST time and I haven’t heard anything back yet. I had some leads from Erika’s experience which I’ve also passed along in my email. Lots of frustrated students, so I’m hoping we can resolve this ASAP. The faculty, however, have all been super. It’s all about the F-word (flexibility), say the deans, and so today was a good example of this. We told the students we’d talk to the faculty and that’s probably the coolest part about being together on the ship. Word spreads pretty effortlessly (which I appreciate has its downsides too!).

But then much progress in other areas. Sherri has put together a great Powerpoint for basic research skills & proxy server help, which we're currently testing out on our workstudy students, she taught 2 classes yesterday, and she's working on collection development recommendations on race & racism. We also spent some time today talking about promotion & rank at UVA & UCSB. It's interesting how different they are. UCSB has no affiliate rank, assistant is their lowest. And they have 3-year review cycles, with steps inside each rank. Each review cycle sounds considerably more intense than our 1-year reviews, but going from rank-to-rank isn't then as dramatic (unlike our promotion process).

I loaded all the patron records into the new ILS yesterday and all the bibliographic records today. I’ve got a handful of errors to clean up manually, but all in all pretty clean. I should define "clean" as what was in Winnebago is now in Destiny and we didn’t lose any itemtypes or patron information. What says Reference in Winnebago says Reference in Destiny, etc. As mentioned in previous posts, much of the data could still stand for further massaging. We’ve set up all the policies, we’ve customized the homepage. We’re pretty much ready to go. I’m waiting on Kenny, the crew IT manager, to adjust his alias for us. He created an alias so that users can just type "library" in their browser bar & have us come up. (How cool would that be if we did that on our home campuses???) But we changed the location of the page we are using at start-up and so I need him to fix his alias. Tomorrow, we’ll run a report from Winnebago looking for all the checked-out items and have the workstudy students check them out in Destiny. And then I think we are ready to switch. There are still things we need to set up (Z39.50 for OCLC), futzing with permissions, Destiny has a “categories” feature that we think will be useful for reserves, etc. Those will come as we learn more. But, we can check books out now and check them in again and renew them, we can edit item records and bibliographic records, staff can log in for staff functions from machines other than the single computer at the front desk, users can look up materials from their own laptops, and we've given users an easier path to the UVA databases (when the proxy server is working, that is ...) and all that is all good. And, we've officially christened the system Explorer (rather than calling it Destiny). The rest will come …

… and all this without the need for one single committee … how cool is that???