Annual Report

Information Resources Council

Academic Year, 1997-98

During 1997-1998, in the third year of its existence, the Information Resources Council re-explored its mission, built communications with the Institutional Planning Committee (IPC) and with the Committee on Educational Planning and Policy (CEPP), reported to the faculty on Skidmore's financial commitment to information technology, and built a base for deliberation and policy recommendations that should prove useful to the College in the coming years.

In particular, the Council completed the following action:

• Surveyed the faculty (85% response) to learn how they are using information technology to support teaching, learning, scholarship, and communications, and conveyed the results of the survey to the community.
  
• Cooperated with the Center for Information Technology (CITS) to facilitate the visit of Brian Hawkins who provided assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of policy, deployment, and support for information technology (IT) at Skidmore.
  
• Reviewed the capital budget for IT recommended by CITS to Business Affairs.
  
• Exchanged perspectives with IPC on financial support for information technology, and arrived at a recommendation for a baseline capital budget to sustain, at least, present levels of curriculum support, faculty scholarship, electronic communications, and data base management.

• Discussed with a subcommittee of CEPP the proper role of IT in enriching the curriculum.

• Explored the increasingly complex arena of intellectual property rights, and recommended that a member of Scribner Library assume responsibility for following developments in this arena, and for informing the community of its related responsibilities.
  
• Listened to a report from the Registrar who described the informational leverage of the new data base system being installed on campus, and the working implications of this system for faculty, students, and staff; discussed a report from the Director of User Services and Academic Computing (CITS) on a new model of discipline-based support for IT (both of these items to be revisited in the fall of '98).
  
• Explored the consequences a very competitive employment market for hiring and retaining information technology specialists in CITS and in Scribner.
  
• Motivated policy (reported at Academic Staff) that establishes firm guidelines for the replacement and redeployment of desk-top computers in academic departments and in administrative offices.
  
• Explored various means for backing up important digital data in academic departments. We arrived at no recommendations; but this is an increasingly important and sensitive issue that will require IRC attention in the fall semester of 1998.
  
• Discussed the need for employing qualified and willing students in support of information technology services, within CITS and within academic departments.
  

• Considered the notion of a calendar-based cycle for the agenda of the Council with the following events influencing the annual schedule: development of the capital budget; surveys of academic and administrative departments; reports from newly energized sub-committees of the Council. This issue will be revisited in fall '98.

The left-over labors of the past year, the growing influences of information technology on our campus, and the turbulence of the marketplace assure us that the coming year for the Council will be at least as demanding as was 1997-98. If last year taught us anything, it is that as IRC moves from infancy to adolescence, its role will be increasingly complex, driven by nuances of local reaction to IT and its costs on the one hand, and by the rush toward innovation on the other. Finding and holding the middle ground in the midst of such uncharted times will make the coming year interesting indeed.

Council members for 1997-98: Micah Alpern, Karl Broekhuizen, Bob DeSieno, Scott Diamond, Leo Geoffrion, Ken Hapeman, Ann Henderson, Rob Linrothe, Stanley McGaughey, Roy Meyers, Vivian Rangil, Phyllis Roth, Peggy Seiden, Denise Smith, Susan Zappen

-RPDS

July 8, 1998