The Computer Campus: Integrating Information Systems and Services

11:00am – 11:10a.m. Welcome and Introduction

11:10 - 11:45 a.m. Challenges to Successful Technology Alignment between Library and Campus IT

OhioLINK is a consortium of 120 academic libraries from across a spectrum of different sizes, missions, and structures.  In this capacity, OhioLINK has been helping our member libraries access licensed content and adjust to technology migrations in a variety of scenarios for over 20 years. This experience has shown that libraries of different sizes face different challenges when undertaking technology integration projects. To better understand the different circumstances at each of our institutions, OhioLINK recently surveyed member libraries. The survey included questions about libraries’ relationships with their campus IT department. OhioLINK also interviewed several libraries of different sizes to find out from their perspectives what kinds of staffing, financial, and technical roadblocks they would expect to encounter on the way to successfully making any change in their current technical environments. This presentation will outline some of the main challenges and barriers identified in the survey and interviews for small, medium, and large libraries when partnering with campus IT organizations.

11:45 - 12:15 p.m. Hybrid IT Alignment: for Campus, Cloud and Community

Research libraries have a long history of cooperating around common needs for technology, resources, and software. However, this approach is not always true between libraries and their central IT units on their campuses. This presentation will discuss use of highly leveraged IT resources for developing appropriate technology management scenarios that extend from the single campus to the large university system. The talk with rethink the leverage brought to bear by current cloud technologies as well as identifying and utilizing community based resources that may become more and more important to the library community over the long-term.

12:15 - 12:45 p.m. Online College Students Report 2018

Each year, more students take college classes online, but that may soon change. In fact, enrollment growth for online students will slow by 2019, according to Eduventures. Meanwhile competition in online education is heating up. To be successful, your institution must demonstrate that its online programs can help students achieve their goals — and follow through after they enroll. If not, you risk losing students to schools that offer in-demand programs and services.

The Learning House, Inc. and Aslanian Market Research surveyed 1,500 current, future and recently graduated online students to identify the programs and services they want most. The results are presented in the seventh-annual Online College Students report. Do you know how many students use mobile devices to finish coursework? Or how often online students use career services?

12:45pm - 1:45pm Lunch Break

1:45 - 2:15 p.m. A Collaborative Approach to Supporting Research and High Performance Computing

Biomedical researchers increasingly need basic programming skills and access to shared computing resources to conduct their research. In response to this evolving research environment, Becker Medical Library and the Center for High Performance Computing at Washington University in St. Louis formed a partnership to support the use of biomedical data analysis software designed for a cluster environment and to develop a series of introductory research computing workshops aimed at researchers new to programming and cluster computing. Demand for the introductory research computing workshops, in particular, has been very high, suggesting that there is a significant need for support in this area on campus. In order to meet this need, we have extended this successful collaboration to include the recently created Institute for Informatics, allowing us to begin to cover additional topics and further support the research community on campus.

2:15 - 2:45 p.m. The Virtual Research Environment and Libraries

Computational tools and techniques and the availability of electronic resources online make it possible to conduct humanities and social sciences research on a level and scale that was inconceivable even a decade ago. This presentation describes The Greek Key, a working prototype Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for the analysis of ancient texts and manuscripts. The VRE was initially developed through a partnership between the University of Missouri and Carleton University, Canada. The plan is to integrate it into the more comprehensive Digital Humanities Gateway, a VRE project currently in development under the auspices of University of Missouri’s Libraries and Cyberinfrastructure Council. The aim of the VRE is to support research at all levels and scales and to bring people together across institutions and international borders. How can academic librarians contribute to new digital research in the humanities and social sciences? The talk will share experiences concerning the challenges and prospects in creating, integrating, and supporting leading edge technology environments.

2:45 - 3:15 p.m. GIS Services at Michigan State University Libraries: Interactions with the wider campus

GIS (Geographic Information System) services are a common offering at many libraries. Prior to 2015, Michigan State University Library did not have a GIS Librarian or accompanying services. Navigating the campus GIS service ecosystem and larger library while developing services has been an important part of creating GIS services at the library, and these interactions will be discussed in the context of describing our services and research assistance. Specific collaboration with central IT includes coordinating to jointly manage the ESRI ArcOnline/Pro campus subscriptions. I will also talk briefly about data discovery and purchasing challenges, and the BTAA Geoportal, created to improve discoverability of GIS data.

3:15 - 3:30 p.m. Afternoon Break

3:30 - 4:00 p.m. Web Privacy and Web Analytics

Privacy is a long-held value of libraries. Today’s networked technologies—including social media, web analytics, and cloud computing—present new challenges for achieving privacy. Google Analytics offers an instructive use case. This leading third-party analytics tracker is widely implemented on library websites, yet its privacy incursions are not widely understood by librarians or library users. How can we realize our values and achieve privacy in the age of analytics? This presentation will provide an overview of the main issues associated with this question, and discuss practical and strategic responses that libraries can implement to enhance our analytics practices with a view towards privacy.  

4:00 - 4:30 p.m. The lock to the safe has been tampered with: Why FERPA & IRB aren’t enough to protect student data in higher education

This presentation will discuss why the Federal Education Rights Privacy Act (FERPA), and Institutional Review Boards (IRB), are not effective safe guards for protecting student data in this time of big data and learning analytics, even in the library. It will then touch on how the methodologies used in assessment and learning analytics are unintentionally, or intentionally, misused. The presentation will end with a list of practical actions that people can take in response to what they will learn from this presentation.

4:30 - 5:00 p.m. Roundtable Discussion