As a member of Cortland’s NCATE Steering Committee, I have been trying to establish some consistent means of assessment that can be used by various programs, each with its own standards. Today several of us had a conference call with TaskStream, the company that has developed the e-portfolio system used in several academic departments. We learned about TaskStream’s Accountability Management System (AMS), which together with the Learning Achievement Tools (LAT) can be customized to create the data we need to support the SPA documents.  Sounds like a foreign language? Well, maybe. But we all seem to understand each other and are feeling confident that we’ve got the tools we need.

Library bibliographers, in concert with our technology trainer, will work with academic departments to deploy the Task Stream e-portfolio system to collect data that maps to the accreditation standards on which we are evaluated.  It’s all about knowing which technologies to use for which processes, and we seem to have a plan. Lots to do in the next two years!

I’ve been working with the budget administrators in Information Resources to decide how we can best absorb the cuts, which amount to 20 percent this year.  SUNY Cortland does not stand alone in this  unfortunate situation. An article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education reports that “45 percent of public universities reported cuts in their central technology budgets for the current academic year” and “about 22 percent of four-year private colleges reported such cuts.”

SUNY Cortland is responding in a manner similar to many other institutions facing serious budget threats: we have identified our priorities and are continuing to offer — and in some cases expand — our technology services. We are looking at ways to fully utilize our new portal, myRedDragon, by improving the mechanisms we use to communicate with our students. Our instructional technology resources are growing, and more students and faculty than ever are using our services. 

Unfortunately, we are not able to continue our aggressive program of building new technology spaces; however, there are several new buildings being planned that will include state-of-the-art technology facilities. Ironically, in New York State, while public colleges and universities have seen their operating budgets cut this year, the capital budgets have been held harmless. This will certainly present a challenge if the resources to support the new facilities are not forthcoming, but for now, the building continues.

The current budget strain is an unpleasant reality, but we’ve seen such difficulties in the past. Our ongoing planning efforts and our strategic planning process give us a framework to move forward — and maintain the integrity of our mission and services.

As CIO I acknowledge the two distinct cultures within a blended IT organization. I have come to accept and respect the inherent differences. I do believe that as instructional technologies are now so closely integrated into the entire teaching learning process there are more similarities than differences. As librarians and IT professionals work together, many of the earlier barriers between the two groups have been broken down.

The Tech Therapy podcast does a nice job of delineating the differences and similarities between the two groups. Whether true or not, there are also have been many perceptions  that each group has of the other.  And if the old adage about how others see us holds true, there’s been a lot of negativity to overcome.

Research studies of the IT and Library cultures go back to the 1980’s, when technology began to radically change the face of libraries and their necessary relationships with IT.  Research that I studied in the early 2000’s revealed that IT professionals considered librarians to be inflexible and rigid, with little or no understanding of technology and no desire to learn. Librarians were perceived as moving slowly and cautiously and engaging in too much discussion before embarking on new directions, and theirs was a tradition of standards, tradition and structure.

Librarians did not hold technologists in high esteem, considering them to be technocratic and  disorganized, with high regard for data and little regard for information, knowledge, and disciplinary research needs and valuing technology for its own sake. As librarians and technologists have developed closer working relationships, some of the stereotypic perceptions have been dispelled, and to some extent have been replaced with the acknowledgement of similarities between the two groups, and certainly the recognition of mutual goals.

Much of my work as CIO has been to bridge the cultural gap between the two groups and create an environment that fosters collaboration and respect. A blended IT organization certainly has facilitated coordination among the technology and information groups, but organizational structure is less important than an atmosphere that encourages ongoing communication and interaction. There are still schools where IT and libraries remain isolated from each other, but that is less common now. There are more partnerships and cooperation as the two groups are working together to achieve common goals. 

Web 2.0 technologies are blurring the distinctions, as are Learming Commons that offer a single service point for information — in whatever form it exists. Whether the data is physically in the library or in cyberspace becomes immaterial. Whether faculty and students are assisted by technologists or librarians is of little or no consequence. What matters is the information itself, along with the ability to access what is needed here and now. As our world of technology and information continues to change, so do the relationships between librarians and technologists.

We spent some time reflecting — and chuckling about –how IT so often takes the lead on developing policies about the sharing and protecting of institutional records, even though IT is rarely, if ever, the creator or custodian. Similarly, it is typically the IT group that shepherds through policies on security and the use of e-mail, the Web and other communications tools. Why? Because these records and communications tools, along with so many learning modes, are electronic and the need to protect institutional data has become paramount. 

In reality the focus of the policies should not be on the format, but nevertheless in this digital era that is usually the case. At Cortland, I typically coordinate the development of such policies, of course relying on the resources and expertise all of the appropriate offices such as the Registrar, Student Accounts, and Student Affairs, etc. Most recently I have been organizing efforts to develop a comprehensive College FERPA policy that protects student privacy, yet allows the campus to share information as necessary to conduct the business of the institution and adhere to Federal law requirements.

During the two days our Legal Counsel was on campus we met with a number of different campus groups including the President’s Cabinet, which ultimately approves most of the important campus policies. We spent a lot of our time discussing FERPA and the implications for the many offices who are custodians of records. We talked about illegal file sharing and proceedures for handling DMCA complaints. We also talked about HEA reauthorization, and what instituions will need to do be be in compliance.

Getting back to the Tech Therapy Webcast, it was the first of two Webcasts to examine how legal issues impact IT and vice-versa. In these days of eLearning and creation of online intellectual property, and with so  many records and communications in electronic format, IT’s integral part in the educational enterprise has many legal implications. In addition to regulars Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast, three attorneys participated in a lively conversation about legal issues that are impacting all of us.  Tune in for a thought-provoking discussion on a timely topic.

The challenge as always is getting the word out to campus about the many services and resources that we offer. Faculty and students alike are interested in Web 2.0 technologies and the interest in their use is growing, as evidenced by the size of those tag clouds on the Tech Info blog. Many of IR’s instructional services are located in Memorial Library and next week they are hosting an Information Fair to showcase instructional technologies for faculty and students. The IR annual Information and Technology Planning Document has been updated and is a good barometer for progress and priorities.

I was invited to attend the last class of the semester where students (Adolescence Education majors) in an English Language Arts Class presented their final projects. The instructor had participated in our Institute on Teaching Strategies last summer, and redesigned her class to be truly collaborative using Web 2.0 technologies.

The class developed a wiki and blog, and their final assignment was designed for students to research a contemporary societal issue and communicate through the electronic media and social networking applications. The instructor, who herself was just learning about new media and their applications in education, took a risk. The success of her class would partially depend on robust and reliable systems and strong technical support. The class required collaboration of many kinds: among students, between faculty and students, and also among the class (both instructor and students), librarians, and technologists.

For me, that is where the proverbial rubber hit the road, and where the distinctions between information itself and technology were forever blurred. Research, writing, and technology skills became parts of a greater whole. The advantages of our blended library/IT organization were never so apparent: the librarians and the technology trainer worked together and they engaged the support of our distributed computing and enterprise technologists, who made systems work and provided centralized storage for the data-intensive final projects.

The instructor will be giving a presentation about her experience in developing and teaching this class at the upcoming SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies (CIT). You can check out the student projects at the following links:

Liberation in the Classroom

Free Tibet  

Find Your Musical Identity

America’s Sacred Oil 

Child Abuse:  A Call to Action

Are You at Risk?

Speaking for Those Who Can’t Speak for Themselves  

Anti-Semitism in Cortland  

South Otselic Town Website  

America’s Self-Image  

One Shot to Save a Life  

ELA and Technology: A Modern Approach to ELA Learning�

Last week’s Green IT Conference dealt with issues of global warming and the role of IT in finding solutions to reducing the carbon footprint. Plenary session speakers were from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the Gartner Group. Information Technology has a responsibility to reduce its own energy consumption through energy savings both at the enterprise and distributed levels and through responsible recycling of electronics. IT can provide systems for monitoring energy and systematically managing power campus-wide and offer leadership as campuses invest in and adopt new energy saving technologies. Reduce, reuse, and recycle was the mantra.

I found out about many on-line resources devoted to Green IT. Some of the more useful include:

The Green Grid — a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems.

Simply Green: A Few Steps in the Right DirectionToward Integrating Sustainability into Public Sector IT — a Paper fromthe Center for Digital Government features best Green IT practices in state and local government

The Federal Electronics Challenges promotes initiatives to encourage the purchase of greener electronic projects, the reduction of energy during their use, and the management of obsolete electronics in an environmentally safe way.

Energy Cost Calculators — these Energy Cost Calculators at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Web site estimate the energy cost savings from buying more efficient products.

A Guide to Greener Electronics — a ranking by Greenpeace of electronics manufacturers based on their global policies and practices on eliminating harmful chemicals and on taking responsibility for their products once they are discarded by consumers.

The question of different cultures arises whenever the topic of blended organizations is discussed. Of course there are the distinct library and IT cultures, but there are also the administrative/enterprise and the academic cultures within IT to be considered, to say nothing of the media services culture, which is a hybrid of sorts. In actuality, there are probably more similarities than differences among the various cultures. In order to successfully meet the needs of the campus, a new culture with common values needs to exist. Everyone involved must be committed to working collaboratively, and must recognize the importance of new technologies to benefit students and faculty by enhancing the learning experience.

In Cortland’s blended organization, we recognize the unique characteristics of the four departments that comprise Information Resources. At the same time we work to create synergies among the departments. To this end, many of our IT initiatives such as Second Life and iTunesU are managed by cross-departmental teams, with each team member bringing distinct strengths and skills. We often include teaching faculty on our teams, since we need to understand their needs and specific teaching objectives. We recognize and respect organizational boundaries, but as we work together to be creative with emerging technologies, those boundaries have become less important.

In the IT and library worlds change is constant and it is everywhere. First the Internet, then the Web, then Web 2.0, each requiring us to review our services and how we provide them and to revisit our organizations and their structures.  Change is an evolutionary process, influenced in large part by the the new information and communications technologies that are reshaping our lives at home and in the workplace.

A common adage states that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. Before considering strategies for change and developing processes, we must understand what needs to change and why. In order for change to be effective we must carefully analyze our current situations and thoroughly understand what we do and how we do it. We need to review everything – our policies, services, organization, staffing patterns, facilities, and our technologies and how we use them. As a metaphor for this process, the Chronicle podcast uses the activity of clearing out old vines. We must first separate the vines and understand how they are growing before carefully pruning them so they can sustain a healthy growth.

 As we continue to face rapidly changing and often unpredictable environments, we must constantly assess and modify our operations. Our future successes depend on how well we manage and anticipate change at all levels of our organizations.

Such merged organizations have been around for awhile. When I came to SUNY Cortland almost fifteen years ago to establish and lead this type of combined administrative unit, there were other such models in higher education, each with its unique structure and personality. In the late 1990’s SUNY Cortland participated in a research study on the topic which was conducted by Tara Lynn Fulton, then a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University. Her 2001 Ph.D. dissertation, “Integrating Academic Libraries and Computer Centers: A Phenomenological Study of Leader Sensemaking about Organizational Restructuring,” examined the experiences of seven CIOs who had created Information Services units that included libraries and IT departments.

The Chronicle article refers to “at least three dozen colleges” having merged their library and technology departments. The Campus Computing Project, which supports a continuing study of the role of information and technology in higher education, indicates that 11.3% of the 555 colleges and universities responding to their survey have a library that reports to a CIO position. The majority of libraries reporting to a CIO are in private four-year colleges (15.6%), followed by community colleges (13.3%) and public four-year colleges (10.2%). Although several high-profile research universities such as Columbia and Indiana University have merged organizations, only 2.7% of public and 5.9% of private research universities have libraries reporting to a CIO.  

Whatever the organizational structure and whatever it’s called, in order to be successful, IT and Library staff must work well together, providing seamless service to the campus. The focus must be to know what kind of services and resources our students and faculty need and to make them readily and easily available.