Academic Computing Committee

Meeting Minutes

November 12, 2007

Members Present:

University Senate Representative: J. Alvares, R. Wolfson

Faculty Representatives: S. Sotillo [CHSS Faculty Rep.], S. Shapiro [Library Faculty Rep.], R. Subramanian [proxy for SBUS Faculty Rep].

Administrative Representatives (Academic Deans): M. Mallery [Library Administrative Rep.], A.J. Kelton [CHSS Administrative Rep.], R. Salomon [SBUS Administrative Rep.], S. Poger [CEHS Administrative Rep], S. Shappell [Graduate School Administrative Rep.], P. Kahn [proxy for Associate Vice President for Information Technology]

Non-voting Members Present: J. O'Brien, OIT

Guest: M. Heller.

Absent: C. Du [CSAM Faculty Rep], E. Renfro-Michel [CEHS Faculty Rep.], A. Pemberton [CART Faculty Rep.], S. Garber [CART Administrative Rep.], J. Youn [CSAM Administrative Rep.], T. Devlin [Academic Coordinator of Education Computing Network], D. Stevens [Undergraduate Student Rep], A. Mohiuddin [Graduate Student Rep.], VACANT [Undergrad. Student Rep.]

Presiding: M. Kasner, Chair

Reporting: M. Mallery, Secretary

Distribution: ACC Web at http://frontpage.montclair.edu/acc/

Convened: 3:12 p.m. [Library Special Collections Room]

Adjourned: 4:35 p.m.

1. Call to Order: The meeting was called to order at 3:12 p.m. when there was a quorum.

2. Minutes: Members approved the ACC September 10th and October 8th meeting Minutes with minor amendments.

3. Announcements:

Kelton announced that he will be speaking on the CHSS Second Life Pilot Project at the Northeast Connect conference on November 16th in New York City at the CUNY Graduate Center, and he is also presenting on Second Life at the Rutgers U. Office of Information Technology's Game Night on Wednesday, November 14 at 3:30 p.m. in ASB Annex 1, Busch Campus.

4. Reports

• Chair's Report: Kasner reported at the request of the ACC, he had reserved the Courtyard Lounge in University Hall for the December 10th ACC meeting.

• OIT Report: Kahn reported that the Bell Tower Initiative is on schedule with the RFP call out since October 22nd. Also, the audiovisual equipment has been updated.

Kasner noted that in the renovation of classroom and lab spaces, chalkboards are not installed by MSU; they are automatically changed to a whiteboard. Salomon said that requests for replacements are made through the Dean's office to the IT Tech. Coordinators in each school.

Kahn noted that she and the Tech Coordinators are putting together policies for disseminating video podcasts. ACC is invited to a meeting on November 28th at 9:30AM in University Hall.

The BlackBoard system will be upgraded over the Winter break, and BlackBoard will be inaccessible from January 2 through 4, 2008 during the upgrade.

Kelton noted that SmartBoards were not listed as part of the recent OIT equipment inventory. O'Brien asked that Kelton send him comments on the inventory via email.

Alvarez asked about the policy for repairing or replacing digital projectors. Kasner said that first contact for equipment failure in the Chemistry Department is the Tech. Support staff.

O'Brien explained that Tech. Coordinator staff will troubleshoot any equipment failure, and if they can't fix it, they call the Help Desk and consult before the item is escalated for replacement. Also, IT works to keep 3 to 5 ceiling type data projector on hand for emergency replacements for current mediated classrooms and not for aging or broken portable projectors. Budgeting in IT is committed to replace projectors as they go down.

• Ad Hoc Committee Reports:

a) Learning Management Subcommittee (LMS):

Kahn (Chair) reported that the LMS met on November 5th and reviewed the planned BlackBoard upgrade over Winter Break. There was also discussion about the moodle open source course management system. The next meeting will be December 17th.

b) Digital Repository SubCommittee:

Mallery (Chair) reviewed the "Report on Digital Repositories at MSU" prepared by the DR SubCommittee and distributed via the ACC listserv. Kelton moved and Kahn seconded, and the ACC voted unanimously in favor of adopting the recommendations of the Report:

***

The Committee recommends that the Faculty Senate and the Office of Information Technology convene a working group that will be responsible for:

* investigating a repository infrastructure for MSU, including issues of advocacy, process and ingest, and developments in resource discovery and use.

* developing a policy environment where digital asset production will flourish. These policies would manage the creation, supply, access to and preservation of digital images, multimedia, research papers, etc. for the purposes of education or research.

* finding and exploiting synergies across MSU and beyond, gathering scenarios and use cases from projects, establishing liaisons with faculty and staff and other national and international institutional repositories.

***

After discussion on the the nature of an institutional repository and the logistics of how to convene a working group to implement the recommendations of the DR Report, the ACC voted unanimously to have Kasner wait before bringing the recommendation to the Faculty Senate and invite Ed Chapel to come to the December ACC meeting to ask for his recommendations and ideas in response to the DR SubCommittee's Report.

4. Old Business:

a) Communication Methods - Kasner asked for the ACC to discuss how to improve communication with the faculty on campus. Kelton noted that campus email is not the best means of communication, and sometimes, as with a recent librarynews listserv post on a resource being unavailable over the weekend, the email is not delivered in time.

Kelton recommended RSS feeds as a better way to communicate campus news. For ease of setting up RSS feeds by faculty, Kahn recommended and will send out to the ACC listserv the URL for the popular YouTube video by CommonCraft on how to set up RSS feeds.

5. New Business:

a) Next Meeting - The next meeting of the ACC is scheduled for Monday, December 10th, in the Courtyard Lounge in University Hall. After discussion, Kasner agreed to cancel the January, 2008 ACC meeting, which was scheduled on Martin Luther King Day. The ACC will meet on February 11th in the Library's Special Collections Room for the first meeting of 2008.

6. Adjournment:

The meeting was adjourned at 4:35 PM.