New Staff Copier/Scanner. Our New Staff Copier/Scanner (Sharp MXM264N) Seems to Be Working

Director's Cut

(April 2013) Where did the semester go? We have less than 8 weeks to go, and it seems we just started the semester yesterday. Always nice to see the continuing thousands of students who enter our doors every week, here to make their school experiences more successful thanks to our services and our environment and our staff. -GR

Technology Clips

 New Student Printers. Our two new student printers (HP LaserJet M602) were installed in late March, and have been working very, very well - much faster and more well- behaved than our old printers, with a much higher capacity. The old printers were good printers when first ordered a number of years back, but we had no idea that printing volume would triple over a very few years, which overwhelmed the poor dears.

 New Staff Copier/Scanner. Our new staff copier/scanner (Sharp MXM264N) seems to be working quite well, albeit a tad slower than expected. The scan-to-PDF function is very handy for those of us who need this functionality, and Leah has added the frequent- users to the machine's directory for faster scanning (if you want to be added, let her know). The new copier is also now our fax machine, and receives all library faxes sent to the library's fax number (479-6500). Our old Canon machine is now happily ensconced in the MLC, for use by their staff and students.

Library Clips

 Staff Changes. Welcome again to our newest colleagues: Katie Clark, who is filling Anna Avila's position as our Reserves Coordinator, Aleah Klophaller who will soon be filling Julie O'Reilly's position in Technical Services, Lori Chavez, who is our new Tutorials Coordinator, and of course Leah Hlavaty, who began with us in March as our new Library Associate! This is a pretty significant influx of new people, one which will no doubt be having a considerable impact on our world, in the months and years to come.  Mental Health First Aid. Laura Dickie and Vicki Allen attended a Mental Health First Aid 12-hour training session presented in March by Diane Avelar, Psychological Counselor and Katie Dowling, Faculty Director, Nurse Practitioner. "If you have dealt with a student who has been overly stressed, aggressive, despondent, or anxious beyond what would be considered appropriate for the situation (my essay didn’t print so now I’m mad at you) MHFA allows you to be able to get a better understanding of what to do in unconventional situations." Look for a more detailed writeup about this session coming soon from Laura Dickie!

 MOBAC Bits. A few tidbits from the past few MOBAC Admin Council meetings: o Hartnell is starting to talk about filling open positions, and is considering moving from an 18-week semester to the compressed 16-week calendar that Cabrillo uses. They also lost their library classroom to 2 math classes held regularly during prime library session time, complicating their course-related instruction sessions. o MPC has a new president and other new administrators, and is recruiting for a Digital Services Librarian. They are also weeding their entire collection. o Gavilan is overhauling their website, and using LibGuides for some of their course-related instruction sessions. o Both Monterey Public and Santa Cruz Public are considering moving to SkyRiver, owned by Innovative, for their bib cataloging. This could lead to fewer and fewer of their holdings in OCLC, which would impact us if (when?) either library ever resumes ILL lending... o Both Monterey Public and Watsonville Public are intending to buy Sierra, the new Innovative CMS-style platform replacing the java-based Millennium system we use. I'm looking forward to seeing Sierra in action, as it may be in our future, too! o Both Santa Cruz Public and Watsonville Public are considering a local, county- wide Big Read, to allow them to pick a local title of interest to our own county. o Monterey Public Library will be trying to use creative staffing to add Sunday open hours (a big priority for their Friends of the Library group), and is building a glass-walled quiet study area (no smoking in there). o Santa Cruz Public has decided to dump their new ILS (Evergreen), & is starting a vendor selection process to likely move back to a commercial product for their catalog and processing systems. o Naval Postgraduate School has a new provost & a new president. Also new student printers/copiers, unfortunately experiencing some technical issues for staff and for students. They print over 1 million pages per year, which makes our 250,000 last year seem puny... o Watsonville Public finished paying off their new building site last month, which will allow them to redirect funds to expanded hours as well as expanded staffing. o Casey Protti-Coonerty of Bookshop Santa Cruz gave a presentation of their Espresso Book Machine, a print-on-demand machine that the Cabrillo bookstore had considered a few years back. The experiment is primarily being funded by the manufacturer, as they test the machine for possible sales to other independent booksellers. Lots of equipment tinkering needed, kinda slow to print, and the demand has been underwhelming, so the machine is likely to be retired later this Spring. Sounds like a cool idea that isn't quite ready for prime time...

 Library Deans & Directors Meeting. I attended the annual meeting of the deans & directors of California's community colleges (over 80 colleges represented this year), and came away with the usual assortment of interesting information and tidbits: o Aaron Schmidt gave an excellent presentation on designing library websites for users. "We are not our patrons" - what we think they want is not necessarily what they want. "Remove words" - less is more. Example of a well-designed library website: Montana State University Library. o Peter McDonald, Dean of Library Services at Fresno State University, reported that the CSUs have created a CSU Assessment Team, a group of librarians and social science researchers who are working on setting national standards for measurement of SLOs/AUOs for libraries. He also shared that most CSUs identify students being served at all service points with student swipe cards, including the library reference desk, info comp sessions, etc. What a concept... o Bryce Harris, our Chancellor, joined us to review the budget situation (mildly hopeful), and spoke briefly about the "MOOC wildfire" that is rushing across higher education. o EBSCO has a new-ish e-book collection called EBSCO Academic, using a subscription (not outright purchase) model, fairly inexpensive, and allowing for multiple simultaneous users. We will be investigating this one. o Patric Perry, Vice Chancellor of Technology, who worked last year to get us the statewide EBSCO database collection, shared info on new statewide technology initiatives being worked on, including WageTracker (which would track wages of students who graduate from community colleges, using wage data from EDD, and would include breakdowns by program and by college), and a Distance Education proposal (which could include a statewide purchase of a learning management system - like BlackBoard - as well as expanded @One training and enforceable good distance ed practices as a pre-condition of use). o K. G. Schneider, the Free Range Librarian, gave a mesmerizing talk on the topic of Radical Optimism. A very inspiring speaker - I encourage you to peruse her blog.

Campus Clips

 New Faculty Positions. Due to some unexpected resignations, two additional full-time faculty positions are being recruited, with a Fall 2013 start date: a CIS position and possibly a Counselor position.

 President Replacement. Interviews for the permanent president position will be held in early May, with finalists likely invited to public forums on May 22-23.

 Emergency Phones. The emergency phones sprinkled about the campus are in the process of being replaced/repaired, a much-needed project and a serious safety issue. Most of these phones (about 25) automatically dial 911 when being used - which was the problem, as numerous water leaks and other damage was apparently resulting in repeated ghost dials into 911 (not a good thing).

 Student Success Scorecard. The Chancellor's Office unveiled the new Student Success Scorecard, which contains a number of metrics that will be available to the public for every California community college. These are very high profile measures, and will likely prompt some serious attention by colleges as they try to get their numbers to be at least close to, if not above, state averages. If you haven't seen it yet, here's Cabrillo's scorecard, which is now available via a link on the campus homepage.