This Week in LIS - 22 August 2008

Weekly news and updates from Luther College Information Technology Services. To receive email updates, please sign up here.

Headline of the Week: The Future of Calendaring at Luther

Beginning in January 2009, we will replacing our current Oracle Collaboration Suite calendaring system for Luther with Norse Calendar, part of our Norse Apps suite of applications we license from Google. Currently only about 250 Luther community members use Oracle, though for some of them it is a critical support application. Our new system will have many benefits including:

  • Everyone will have a calendar – including students. Scheduling things for everyone on campus is about to get much easier.
  • Calendars can be shared and received from users worldwide. For those who want to share their calendar with colleagues or family members (or see their calendars), many new possibilities will exist.
  • Calendaring will integrate directly with email to allow for easy scheduling of meetings.
  • Publishing special calendars for campus use will be much easier and individuals will be able to subscribe to a wide variety of special interest calendars.

The challenge in migrating to a new calendaring system is everybody needs to move at once, since everyone relies on the shared data and meeting information for their schedules. We’ve chosen January 1, 2009 as a good date to switch being the end of both the fall semester and the calendar year. There is a process to migrate data from their existing Oracle calendars into Norse Calendar, and LIS will be sharing that procedure later this fall. However, users who have converted to Norse Apps already can begin using and learning Norse Calendar now. For events occurring in 2009, users can input them directly into Norse Calendar saving the work of importing them later.

LIS will be talking much more about this migration this fall and what it will mean, so stay tuned, and you can look forward to a much more widely-compatible calendaring future.

Personnel Updates

  • We welcome our new Academic Technology Librarian Rebecca Sullivan who officially begins her work with LIS this week as faculty return to campus.
  • Our recruitments for Help Desk Specialist and Programmer Analyst are well underway and applicant review is beginning. We hope to move these recruitments along as both positions are very important support positions that we would like to have filled for fall.

Upcoming Dates

LIS Blog Highlights from the Week

The following articles are sampled from those available on the LIS Blog:

LIS Website Changes

  • No significant changes were made to the website this week.
  • This weekend we will do a fair amount of upgrading and patching to existing modules and services.

Notes from LIS Council

  • LIS Council did not meet this week.

NITLE Opportunities

As a member of NITLE (National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education), Luther has the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of developmental and training programs intended for faculty, librarians, and information technologists. Events listed at the link below are currently open for registration by Luther participants. LIS Staff who are interested in participating in an event should speak with Christopher Barth. Faculty who are interested in participating should speak with Lori Stanley. Participation is contingent upon available funding and program acceptance.

Complete List of NITLE Opportunities

Notable Internet Resource of the Week: Google Insights for Search

The tagline for this site is “See what the world is searching for.” This site from Google lets users mine Google’s rich search data to see what users are searching for, where they’re searching from, and when they’re searching.

For instance, who knew that in Google at least the term “luther college” is on a slight downward trend for search volume since 2004? who knew the rank order of US states searching for “luther college” is Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Illinois, Missouri, Colorado, and Indiana? Who knew that Madagascar leads the world for interest in Britney Spears? Obviously there is no end to the amount of trivial information in this data mine, but there is also a fair amount of useful information as well.

On the web at http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Around the Web

Here are a few links to interesting developments over the past week:

  • Mobility
    • None
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