Annual Report
Information Resources Council
Skidmore College
Academic Year '99-00

In this, the fourth year of existence, IRC cruised into circumstance, turmoil, and turbulence worthy of training a test pilot. Marketplace pressures, rapid change in technology, limitless expectations by students, faculty, and staff, a burgeoning campus digital network, escalating technical demands upon faculty, staff and students all elicited stress, competition for resources, and renewed contemplation of how the College uses information now and how it will use that resource in the future. The policy dimensions of these matters visited IRC, and this is how the Council responded to the issues:

• CITS informed the Council that the campus modem pool is increasingly problematic, costly technology, and wished to consider discontinuing this service. The notion did not play well either in IRC deliberations or among the faculty. Three sessions of discussion about this topic transformed CITS resolve to phase out the modem pool into a search for a solution that does not remove from faculty and staff the access to the Internet that so many depend upon for support of their work at the College. CITS is now considering several solutions that respond to community need, some technical, some associated with Internet Service providers, and will report recommendations to IRC in the autumn.
  
  
• An infestation of requests for new clusters of computers in academic and in administrative departments fostered concerns within Financial Services and within CITS about the capacity of the College to afford and support these resources. IRC responded to these concerns by recommending policy to the Dean of the Faculty and to the VP for Business Affairs, policy that identifies the bases upon which such requests will be considered and justified. That policy has been enacted.
  
  
• IRC convened with the members of the Information Task Force (II) and with president Studley to explore the report of the Task Force and to discuss particular recommendations of that report.
  
  
• The Council listened on several occasions to reports on the progress and difficulties that the College engages as it installs various operations associated with the Oracle database system. IRC will provide reaction to and guidance for proposed strategies that will aid faculty and staff as they prepare to use the new system for advising of students and for gaining information about College operations.
  
  
• The Council studied the proposed Fiscal 2001 budgets for information resources and responded to the spending emphases recommended by Scribner Library and by CITS.
  
  
• IRC explored various aspects of distance learning, held a conversation with Corky Reinhart (Director of UWW) about early campus DL initiatives, wrote a white paper on the issue, and transmitted that document to CEPP. The Council has invited CEPP to explore the issues and to begin developing policy that plans for the consequences that DL will deliver to our campus.
  
  
• The Council explored the challenges that "Napster" elicited on campus as students (and surely some faculty and staff) discovered the joys of moving music, willy nilly, from one PC to another, shredded traditional notions of intellectual property rights, slowed the College network data transmission to a crawl, and summoned the possibility of law suits from groups such as "Metallica" as well from a now incensed music industry. Embedded within this mix is opportunity for adding new dimensions to liberal learning and for exploring ethics within the information age. Given the attitudes of the times and the free-market agendas encouraged by new technologies, it is difficult to say what the outcome of these circumstances will be. One thing seems certain, IRC will explore these issues again.
  
  
• The Council, in collaboration with Leo Geoffrion, developed a strategic plan for campus information resources and conveyed that plan to the Institutional Planning Committee.
  
  
• The Council developed a schedule for its agenda in the coming years, an effort to systematize the deliberations of IRC, and to assure that the Council approaches large and strategic issues in timely fashion each year. That schedule can be viewed at the web site: http://www.skidmore.edu/irc/archives/, read the IRC agenda for March 24, '00.

Members of the Council:

• Karl Broekhuizen (VP for Business Affairs)
• Pola Baytelman (Music)
• Ruth Copans (Interim College Librarian
• Jonathon Cotton (student)
• Robert DeSieno (M&CS)
• Leo Geoffrion (Director of User and Academic Services, CITS)
• Michael Gittleman (student)
• Ken Hapeman (CITS Director)
• Ann Henderson (Registrar)
• Rory McVeigh (Sociology, Anthropology, & Social Work)
• Michael Marx (English)
• Roy Meyers (Biology)
• Phyllis Roth (Dean of the Faculty)

-RPDS