The latest tech news in the Walker Management Library, for the month of November and the first week of December, 2005.

1) SSN & the Library - Concerned about the library using your social security number for patron identification? You aren't the only one. Last month, Jody Combs, Dale Poulter, George Anglin, Flo Wilson, John Haar, and Mike Martin (ITS) met to discuss the state of university transition to a non-SSN unique identifier that would be used for all Vanderbilt-affiliated people, allowing the Library to move away from using the SSN as part of our authentication mechanism. The Library has been working toward a solution that will use LDAP for authentication and which might be ready in the late spring. Any transition by the University to a new identifier is likely to be several years out.

2) New printers – Kilimanjaro and Matterhorn have officially been replaced with new HP 9050, high speed duplex printers. Even the duplexing is impressively fast (which is working now, by the way). Dean Bradford paid for the 2 expensive printers, and thanks goes to David, Rachel, Brent, Danny, and Barry for their hard work in moving this forward. And thanks also goes to the staff for being patient for so long! And thanks to Danny for setting them up so quickly. David will be putting an announcement in the Owen Daily News for Monday announcing the new printers. Hurray!

3) VUprint - Most of the libraries have seen a decrease in the volume of printing. Bill Hook has been monitoring this all very closely, and is happy things have been running fairly smoothly with few maintenance requests and technical problems. The undergraduate SGA recently passed a resolution calling for VUprint to give a free print allocation to all students of 600 pages, and then charge. The student proposal/demand for a "free print allocation" is technically possible, but the VUprint committee has not worked out any campus-wide agreement about how that would be administered or what impact that would have on the overhead costs for the Card office. Bill has suggested that all involved in VUprint meet in January to discuss how things are currently going, and to discuss future plans for VUprint.

4) VUprint working with the new printers – The new printers should now work with the VUprint workstations. That is, people sitting at the public workstations can now once again print to any printer in the library.

5) Web Seminar – Rachel attended a 1 hour web seminar, New Learning Technologies and Emergent Practices in Higher Education, on Tuesday, November 8th . Many trends were discussed, including: learning management systems, blended or hybrid learning, ePortfolios, wifi, video conferencing, podcasting, gaming, instant messaging, and social software. They talked about how students today are "always on" and using technology for methods of self-expression.

6) GIS Brown Bag – A crowd of 28 people attended the GIS Brown Bag on Wednesday, November 30th. Rick Stringer-Hye, Rachel Vacek, and Brian Christens, Director of Vanderbilt's Census Information Center showed maps, GIS websites, and spoke about the fundamental principles of GIS, how GIS services are being utilized in peer libraries, and resources already available at Vanderbilt, such as data repositories, GIS labs, and the various GIS services that are currently being provided. The new GIS (Geographic Information Systems) resource guide is linked off the Heard Library website under "resource guides" and will be advertised in an upcoming staff newsletter as well as in the Heard Library's news ticker.

Have a good weekend, everyone! Thanks for your attention and time!