Williams College
Self-Study for Accreditation
Library and Other Information Resources
We continue to have excellent library and information technology resources to support our teaching and learning. In both areas our resources meet the specialized demands of a faculty that employs advanced methods and literature in its teaching and that is highly research-oriented as well as those of students who do independent and creative research.
Since the last accreditation review the Williams College Library has expanded its collections, increased dramatically the availability and ease of use of electronic databases, and paid special attention to educating students in how to use library and other information resources. In the last few years the staff have been greatly involved in planning a new library structure, construction of which will begin in 2008. The Office of Information Technology (OIT) has improved its operations across the board since the last accreditation review and has eliminated or greatly reduced problems that the Visiting Team noted in 1997. Both the library and OIT have increased the number of staff with the advanced training and special abilities necessary to meet our mission. Both have benefited from external perspectives, including comparisons with peer institutions, and formal comprehensive internal reviews and intensive self studies by the staffs in preparation for the reviews.
We have room here only for brief summaries of these two vital parts of the College, but substantial supporting material is in the Team Room. This includes for the library, a comprehensive statement by the College Librarian, organized specifically to document how the library meets the various parts of Standard 7, and for OIT a similar statement by the Chief Technology Officer, including an especially full discussion of instructional technology.
We also include here a brief description of the Williams College Museum of Art, for want of any clearly better place for it in the Self Study. The Museum contributes very greatly to the education programs of the Department of Art and other academic departments at Williams, and also provides an important cultural resource for townspeople and visitors to our region.
Williams College Library
The Williams College Library incorporates Sawyer Library, Schow Science Library, Archives and Special Collections, and the Matt Cole Library for Environmental Studies, all of which are overseen by the College Librarian. These units hold more than 890,000 volumes, 401,000 government documents, 10,000 video and 29,000 audio recordings, and 492,000 items in microform formats. In the Oberlin Group, an informal consortium of the libraries of 80 selective liberal arts colleges, our collection size ranks among the top half-dozen and we rank above the 75th percentile in each of the more than 50 statistical categories in the group’s data.
We also have the Chapin Library of Rare Books, an independent operation according to the legal requirements of the main donor’s deed of gift. It holds more than 58,000 volumes. The Chapin and the units of the College Library coordinate closely. It is overseen by the Custodian of the Chapin Library, who reports to the President of the College. We describe it below.
Excluding the Chapin, the library staff numbers 44.7 FTE. Of these, 17 are professional librarians (compared to 14 in 1997) and four are other professional staff. Comprehensive expenditures, including wages and benefits, for 2006-2007 were approximately $5.4 million, and for 2007-08 are budgeted at around $5.6 million, as compared to $3.4 million in 1996-97. The increase is the result of outside factors familiar to any college or university — continually rising prices of journals (print or electronic), increasing demand for access to electronic information resources, and so on — and also of inside ones, such as the increase in the size of the faculty and associated new fields of teaching and research, and continued expansion of interdisciplinary programs ranging from Bioinformatics, Genomics, and Proteomics to Africana Studies. As a proportion of our overall expenditures, however, we spend less on the library than we did ten years ago. In 2006-07, library spending represented 3.3 per cent of our comprehensive costs, compared to 4.0 per cent in 1996-97, and will represent 3.2 per cent in 2007-08. This reduction results in part from the particular initiatives in our strategic plan: many of the areas involving the greatest cost increases did not have immediate significant financial implications for the library. As the off-site storage facility mentioned below and later the new library construction begin to come on-line, we anticipate increases in both staffing and operating costs. We had the fourth highest total acquisitions expenditure among the 80 members of the Oberlin Group in 2005-06 and ranked third in total and per student acquisitions expenditure in 2006-07 in our primary library peer group (Amherst, Bowdoin, Colgate, Middlebury, Oberlin, Swarthmore, Vassar, Wellesley, Wesleyan).
The library reviews and assesses its performance annually, producing a report that serves as a descriptive, analytical, and planning tool (reports for 2005-06 and 2006-07 in Team Room). It has tracked and analyzed statistical data and sought user feedback to an increasing extent as part of its planning process. The Library Committee, made up of students, faculty, and staff, offers continuing comment and advice. In addition to the annual planning cycle, the library engaged in a substantial unit review by the College in 2002-03 (copy in Team Room). It included Web-based surveys of students, faculty, and staff on use and satisfaction with facilities, resources, and services. The replies underscored general satisfaction with services and collections, but not surprisingly the physical characteristics of the Sawyer building received low marks (complete results of surveys are in the unit review report).
The library produced an updated strategic plan in 2006 (in Team Room). The Librarian’s annual report for 2005-06 documents numerous accomplishments in several critical areas.
We can mention here only a few of the most noteworthy accomplishments.
We have expanded the number of electronic journal subscriptions from 406 in 2001-02 to more than 14,000 in 2006-07, and also invested in software to help users identify and access articles, such as by providing a path from on-line bibliographic databases to full-text articles. We have coordinated carefully that expansion with a reduction in paper subscriptions from 1,883 to 1,481, resulting in dramatically increased access to resources for teaching and research while simultaneously controlling the effects of ever-escalating journal costs. We also shifted newspaper back-run subscriptions from microfilm to digital format and increased dramatically the number of newspapers available. The number of digital newspaper searches now far exceeds the use of microfilm in the past. The use of electronic resources remained at a healthy level in 2006-07 with 226,500 total database searches, 160,200 electric journal searches, and 33,400 newspaper searches.
OIT cooperates with the library by providing and supporting a proxy server from which students, faculty, and staff can authenticate their search session and thereby access electronic resources from a computer off campus. Students in our three study-away programs — Williams-Exeter Programme, Williams-Mystic, Williams in New York — or attending approved programs at other colleges and universities have access to the full range of licensed (e-journals, databases, other digital) resources and unlicensed (catalog and guides for courses, subjects, and citations) resources, and they can receive pdf files of journal articles through interlibrary loan.
Another strategy that has been very successful in controlling the costs of increasing quality is participation in multi-institution library consortia. We have been a member of the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) for five years, and are now a priority member, and over that time have benefited from a growing number of its services. We are also a founding member of the more recent NExpress Consortium, consisting of Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Middlebury, Northeastern, Wellesley, and Williams. The NExpress libraries created a combined catalog, so that a member’s user may request items on-line and have them delivered to his or her own library. Both consortia provide services that supplement our resources conveniently and cost effectively.
Notwithstanding these major efforts, we also continue to invest heavily in traditional resources held on site — books, paper journals, sound and visual recordings, maps, and government publications. Individual faculty members play a vital role in selecting books to be added. We place an average of 14,500 orders for monographs in all formats each year. The use of traditional resources continues to be steady. Circulation of books to students has grown in four of the past five years and shows an overall increase of 13 per cent in that time. One meaningful indication of our depth is the extent of our interlibrary lending. We are consistently among the top-ten lenders in New England, and we are the top NExpress lender as well as in the top three (of 15) in the BLC. That record also shows our partners’ regard for our interlibrary loan service.
Our librarians are becoming known more widely for their skill and expertise. Since joining the BLC and helping found NExpress, we have served as consultants to the University of Connecticut, Wellesley, University of New Hampshire, Boston College, Wesleyan, and Bowdoin. Staff have given Web and personal presentations for Serials Solutions, the Innovative Interfaces New England Users Group, the Association of College and Research Libraries New England, the Oberlin Group, and at the ACRL national conference. Our Website has drawn attention from numerous libraries wishing to use it as a model, most recently from the statewide organization of Ohio public libraries. (The redesign of our Website in 2006 benefited from a study of student usability, based on software that tracked “clicks” and pathways as volunteer students used the site.) In turn we have benefited from visits to many BLC and NExpress libraries, with some visits being part of our planning for new library spaces (described below), so that we noticed arrangements of space and designs of services as well as organization structures and ways of working different from our own.
We recently added library-specific questions to the COFHE quadrennial enrolled-student survey. Seventy per cent of Williams respondents said they “often” or “very often” studied in the library, 74 per cent said they often or very often found that the library owned most of the materials they needed for papers and research, and 50 per cent used library electronic resources while not in the library. Only five per cent attended a course-related instruction session often or very often, while 45 per cent said they did so occasionally. We also got feedback during Library Week in April 2007, when nearly 500 people (88 per cent of them students) completed various in-library surveys. The results gave useful information about the services students value most, the importance of physical spaces, and desired characteristics of the new library building.
Instruction and Information Literacy
We have placed a priority on library instruction and on increasing information literacy among students. The staff includes a specialist in library instruction and information literacy. One of our major activities in this respect is working with faculty to develop course-integrated instruction. In 2006-07 staff taught 1,159 students in 84 sessions. We survey faculty in those courses and use the results to improve our instruction. Many faculty observe that the quality of student papers and sources cited increases when the course has had instruction. There is a series of faculty lunches and research workshops at which faculty discuss their needs and librarians introduce new resources and technologies. Librarians also work with students at the reference desks and in one-on-one sessions on how to evaluate information resources and cite them properly. The library also has subject and course guides, database descriptions, and special Web pages on evaluating sources and a detailed guide to citations, and other pages on copyright and public performance rights. Librarians emphasize the need for citations and observance of copyright rules in their instruction activities. Faculty often include a link to the citation Web page in their course syllabi.
During our curricular review in 2000-01, the Committee on Educational Policy solicited input from every quarter of campus, and the library proposed an information literacy (IL) requirement for graduation. Many lauded the goal, but the faculty was not prepared to make it a requirement. To assess our students’ IL, we participated in 2004 in a national survey of student research skills, the Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills (Project SAILS). We were the only liberal arts college to do so. Most participants were large and somewhat less selective state universities; some were community colleges. Nearly 200 Williams students, divided nearly equally among the four class years, completed the Web-based survey; the majority of respondents elsewhere were first-year students. Our students performed at similar levels to those of the larger pool — a disappointing result. Also striking and disappointing was that our juniors and seniors performed at virtually the same level as our first-years and sophomores. This lack of progression may be attributed to our emphasis on course-integrated instruction sessions, offered on individual faculty request. Our present approach does not reach all students, varies from year to year depending on whether faculty supporters are on campus and on what courses they teach, and has no sequencing so some students get basic instruction multiple times. (Project SAILS results in Team Room and at library.williams.edu/programs/infolit/baseline.php)
Our librarians consider the SAILS test an appropriate one. Students who would not do well on such a test, however, do not necessarily fall far short of academic standards in their papers. Our style of teaching is such that faculty routinely work closely with students on papers, and many allow — or even require — students to submit early drafts for comments, so faculty will notice some problems and ensure that they do not persist into final drafts. Nevertheless, it would be better were students better prepared — it would reduce workload on faculty and would allow fewer mistakes to go unnoticed. Librarians and faculty alike remain concerned about students’ selection or omission of sources in their papers. The SAILS assessment and conversations with faculty members confirm that our students’ research skills are not at the level expected of, and required by, faculty.
Reaction from faculty and administration has been promising. The SAILS results were discussed at a full faculty meeting, and the library helped establish an Information Literacy Working Group, made up of faculty, librarians, and other academic support professionals. In the Fall of 2006 the group brainstormed ideas for integrating IL into the curriculum, and developed closer collaboration among academic support professionals outside the library. The Dean of the Faculty, Provost, and College Librarian attended in 2007 a three-day workshop on IL sponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) and NITLE (organized originally as the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, NITLE is a non-profit that offers programs in instructional technology to participating undergraduate liberal arts colleges and universities). The working group and the Committee on Educational Policy reviewed a draft IL plan developed at the CIC/NITLE Workshop. The working group plans additional conversation with academic departments, the Coordinator of the Critical Reasoning and Analytical Skills program, the Program on Effective Teaching, and other faculty groups.
We take seriously the need to broaden the discussion. We see a number of problems that we need to surmount. These include the perceived difficulty of adding IL sessions in a course already overburdened with content; the structure of requirements at Williams, with no single course or small group of courses common to all students, where IL skills could be taught; and many students’ perception that computer competency equals IL competence. Reliance on library-based instruction is insufficient when based on individual faculty commitment, as discussed earlier.
A part of Standard 7 relates to policies on illegal and inappropriate uses of library systems and resources. The library has taken a number of steps, including some in cooperation with OIT, to ensure that we meet the standard, and they are detailed in the Librarian’s supporting statement (in Team Room).
That statement also describes the shortcomings in our physical facilities. Fortunately, we can report that we made the commitment some years ago to improve them and are now in the advanced planning stages of constructing new library and information technology space to replace the existing main library building. This project, scheduled for construction from 2008 to 2011, will provide significantly expanded and enhanced spaces to support the library’s core activities. It will also house the Matt Cole Library for Environmental Studies and a new Center for Media Initiatives. To make the best use of increasingly scarce and valuable campus land, some of the least frequently accessed library materials will be housed in an off-site, high-density storage facility about a mile from campus.
The process of planning the new space has been highly collaborative, with librarians, faculty, and students all involved in major ways. The building committee is co-chaired by a faculty member and the College Librarian. Both have reported frequently to full faculty meetings, and the committee has been open to input from all sides. Our membership in two consortia has helped with our “environmental scan” of what is happening in the world of libraries and we gained much from visits to several consortia libraries. An outcome of this planning process has been integration and heightened cooperation of the library units (Sawyer, Archives, Schow, Matt Cole, and also with Chapin); the many meetings have created camaraderie and ongoing working relationships that have increased the effectiveness of the entire library operation.
One goal for the new space is to integrate better some of the distinct but increasingly overlapping functions of library and instructional technology. The new space will contain a Center for Media Initiatives that will support students and faculty working with a variety of electronic media, and will include audio and video recording and editing facilities. It will be designed to be flexible enough to be adapted over time as traditional library functions and instructional technology continue to evolve and the boundaries between them shift and become less sharp. Here too, the planning process has brought together staff from both areas to work on a common task resulting in better working relationships and understanding. We regard the process of designing the new library and information technology building as evidence of the effectiveness of the collaborative planning process that is part of our culture.
We end this section with a note that the library is an important cultural resource to non-College people in our region, including students at other colleges and universities, and also to independent scholars who use the collections for their own research. The reading areas, computer areas, and stacks are accessible to the general public, and special arrangements can be made for limited borrowing.
Projections: We expect to continue to expand the traditional collections, to add new electronic resources and make electronic resources even more user-friendly, to benefit from multi-institutional consortia, and to educate students in how to use library and other information resources. The Information Literacy Working Group will continue to work with the Dean of the Faculty, Provost, and CEP to remedy what we recognize is a shortcoming in information literacy for many of our students.
An especially important projection, of course, is the availability of new space about to be constructed. It will remedy a major shortcoming that we have had for some time. The space will support the library’s core activities and permit more effective integration with OIT.
The design of the new space requires that we move some infrequently used library materials to a new off-site storage facility and develop new routines to access materials there. We will need to monitor those routines carefully, including getting feedback from a variety of users, to ensure the ready accessibility of the materials.
Chapin Library
The Chapin Library supports the academic program with its collections of rare books, manuscripts, prints, and ephemera. It is open to students and faculty for individual research and to Williams class groups for presentations by faculty and Chapin staff. In 2006-07 staff hosted 27 class groups, including ones for art history, studio art, the Williams-Clark Program, astronomy, American studies, environmental studies, and theatre. Staff seek to give expert and friendly guidance in the use of our holdings, in comfortable, inspiring, and technologically current surroundings. They also endeavor to provide a high-quality inquiry service — in person, or by mail, phone, or e-mail.
Use of the Chapin has increased substantially in the past decade, in particular as its on-line catalog has been brought up to date and as more faculty use primary materials in courses or to illustrate the history of a discipline. Staff are developing Web-based guides, including catalogs of manuscript and art holdings. It is expected that by the end of 2007 all holdings will be in the College Library’s on-line catalog or inventoried through finding aids on the Chapin’s own Website. This will significantly increase the utility of the collections for the typical user.
Though the Chapin remains separately administered, its staff work more actively alongside other College librarians than was the case ten years ago. The Chapin will share quarters with Archives and Special Collections in the new library space now being planned. The staff also have embraced closer cooperation with the Williams-Clark graduate program, offering orientation and other services to its students, one of whom typically works in the Chapin as an intern.
The permanent staff consists of 2.5 FTE. A half-time administrative assistant approved in 2003 was the first and, so far, only addition to permanent staff since the Chapin opened in 1923. However, term staff hired in recent years have successfully cleared the cataloging backlog and will help prepare the collections for moving to storage in 2008 in advance of construction of the new space.
Like the College Library, the Chapin serves the public in our region, for example, by giving presentations to groups from elementary and secondary schools as well as the general public.
Office of Information Technology
OIT supports our mission by providing accessible, reliable, and comprehensive information systems and by enabling faculty, students, and staff to make effective use of technology in teaching, learning, research, and administration. Information technology encompasses far more than computing, as we note often below. With a few exceptions, noted later, OIT provides all support for information technology. As of this writing, the staff number approximately 42 FTE, up from about 27 in 1997. The number of staff has not increased since 2002. Students in our three study-away programs have instructional technology facilities and services that are appropriate to their program and meet or exceed those on campus.
Staff are organized into four groups:
- Instructional Technology supports the use of computing and multimedia technology in teaching, learning, and research, including specialized classrooms, Blackboard, and academic software purchasing, licensing, and support.
- Networks and Systems is responsible for e-mail servers, network file sharing and storage, public computer labs, UNIX support, and Internet connections. It provides a stable, available computing environment around the clock with the exception of scheduled and announced downtime for maintenance and upgrading.
- Desktop Support provides services to faculty, students, and staff in support of their day-to-day and special needs associated with office workstations, including help desks, office visits to resolve problems, computer upgrades, and documentation.
- Administrative Information Systems supports the non-academic computing needs of administrative offices, including support for business systems such as those of PeopleSoft. We use PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning systems for student administration, human resources, and financial records. Maintaining them consumes 90 per cent of the Administrative Information Systems group's resources.
More detail on the functions of each unit is in the OIT supporting statement (in Team Room).
The most recent reorganization of OIT, along with the subsequent increase in staffing, resulted from a combination of factors, beginning with a reorganization of our computing services operation in 1996, an action taken in response to College-wide concerns at the time with the effectiveness of that operation. These concerns were also noted by the accreditation Visiting Team in 1997, and since then we have devoted substantial resources and planning to addressing the issues.
It is a continual challenge to attract and retain qualified computer professionals in any organization, and perhaps even more so in a location like ours. Nevertheless, we increased the size of our staff by over 50 per cent since the last accreditation review and turnover has declined markedly — indeed, it is now low compared with trends in the information technology industry. We have introduced an array of services supporting instructional technology that have increased faculty satisfaction with OIT. We have adopted software and hardware standards that have resulted in the ability to provide improved service for supported software and hardware and in a more realistic alignment of user expectations regarding support. Our network services are much more stable and reliable than they were a decade ago (the network is now up and running reliably over 99 per cent of the time), and interruptions of service, when they do occur, tend to be triggered externally. We have also increased expenditures on information technology to better match the necessary costs of providing quality service. OIT spending in 1996-97 was $3.3 million, or 3.9 per cent of our total operating expenditures; in 2006-07 it was $7.5 million, or 4.7 per cent.
One of the most significant accomplishments has been OIT’s dramatic expansion into less traditional areas of information technology, such as use of multiple media in teaching and research and support for language instruction, specialized printing, GIS, and music. For example, we now stream 13 foreign language television stations to desktop computers, with great benefit to language teaching; at least one station is offered for each foreign language we teach. During the 2002-03 academic year, OIT, like the College Library, engaged in an internal unit review preceded by an extensive self study. That review noted numerous accomplishments since the organizational transformation six years prior, as well as a number of areas requiring further attention. The following were some of the achievements already made by 2003:
- The growing success of the help desk in responding to general user requests. In 2002-03, for example, the help desk fielded more than 20,000 calls, and more than 90 per cent were resolved within 24 hours.
- OIT had implemented a Blackboard course management software system, and a large number of faculty had adopted it. Since the review the number of courses using Blackboard has risen from 50 to 260 (Fall 2006).
- Administrative offices had implemented the PeopleSoft system.
- OIT had established a planned, regular replacement cycle for desktop computers, electronic classrooms, and labs.
- OIT had established the Williams Instructional Technology program, which brings together students from multiple disciplines to work for ten weeks in the summer on Web-based projects for faculty.
Since the unit review, we have made more progress on a number of fronts, and without addition to total OIT staff. Bandwidth has been increased and is now supplied by two vendors, to provide redundancy in the event of network failure by a single vendor (in the Fall of 2006 one vendor’s service failed for an extended period; thanks to built-in redundancy we remained connected to the Internet the entire time). Desktop Systems now deploys new computers to all faculty and labs on a three-year rotation and instructs faculty in their use. Students can access the PeopleSoft system via the Web from anywhere in the world to register for courses; drop, add, or swap classes during a semester’s drop-add period; and request unofficial transcripts. Treasurers of student organizations can view their financial records. Faculty can see class rosters and information about advisees; department chairs and faculty with grant funding can view detailed financial reports.
Desktop Systems also supports students. It supervises about 40 Student Technology Consultants (STCs), who are students trained by OIT and who staff a student help desk and also help students get on our network early in September each year (by the first day of classes, 96 per cent of students on campus are using the network successfully with their own computers). Twenty Student Media Consultants work in a student media lab.
Instructional Technology has provided some form of support to all faculty in a good number of departments (for example, all Division III departments other than Computer Science, which has its own staff for computer support, and Economics, Philosophy, and Religion), as well as to nearly half the athletic coaches. We have a high quality GIS lab used by faculty in Geosciences, Economics, Environmental Studies, and other departments (this in a college that does not have geography in its curriculum), and one OIT staff person has professional training in GIS. Students completed 108 projects, for 73 faculty, in the summer Williams Instructional Technology program in the six years ending in June 2006. These students gained experience similar to those in the summer research programs in science, math, and statistics, described in the Academic Program section.
Workshops are major examples of OIT’s extensive teaching activities. We offer workshops frequently in the most popular software, and from time to time in subjects like GIS, Unix, and video editing. As a result of frequent offerings the classes typically are small, allowing more effective instruction (for example, since 2001-02 there have been 38 workshops in Dreamweaver and Web design, and the average number of participants has been only slightly more than eight). We offered 296 workshops in the 4-1/2 years ending in December 2006. Occasionally OIT staff teach classes in regular courses.
Details on these activities are in the supporting statement. Last year we formed a working group of administrators and enlisted the services of consultants to help begin to plan for the eventual implementation of a system to support institutional repositories, work that will continue this year. Document imaging will have to be a major feature of such a system. Multiple efforts are underway to improve network security.
Details of the physical infrastructure appear in the Physical and Technological Resources section and in the supporting statement.
We continually face new challenges (as well as ongoing ones) surrounding information technology. The new regulations of SAS (Statement on Auditing Standards) 112 require greater levels of internal control in a number of areas such as controlling changes to production code systems. The recent ramp-up in legal activity by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) requires us to review and adjust our policies regarding appropriate use of copyrighted materials. We are in regular contact with appropriate professionals — auditors, lawyers, and consultants among them — to advise us on how best to respond to these new pressures. The perennial challenges include those of dealing with heavy appetites for hardware and software resources, continuing to provide high-quality services to a larger and increasingly technologically sophisticated group of users, and continually revisiting the question of the appropriate role of technology in providing an excellent liberal arts education.
Part of our strategy for addressing these issues comes from our efforts to understand how well we are doing. OIT regularly assesses many aspects of its operation, collecting statistics on the services it provides and using that information to inform decisions on how to improve services or deploy resources more effectively. Among the many indicators it tracks are effectiveness of the help desks in resolving user issues, frequency of usage of software packages and loaned equipment, surveys of user satisfaction with services such as electronic classroom facilities and the Blackboard course management system, and number of workshop attendees. OIT conducted a faculty survey for the unit review in 2002 and plans another in 2007-08. The 2002 results are in the appended statement and, if available in time, the 2007 results will be in the Team Room.
This attention to user response and interest enables us to understand better the extent to which our resources are being used (or not), the level of satisfaction with those resources, and new directions in which we might move. We supplement this formal data collection with face-to-face interaction and the support of faculty by OIT staff, in the style of assessment that is so common — and important — in the Williams community. An OIT staff member serves as liaison for each academic department. He or she is the first point of contact when faculty need individual help. This system provides a staff person knowledgeable about particular departmental needs and issues along with a mechanism by which we can take the pulse of the faculty on IT issues. In addition, the standing Information Technology Committee, made up of faculty, students, and staff, meets regularly throughout the academic year to advise OIT on a range of issues. The understanding of the IT needs and desires of faculty and students that these structures provide leads frequently to initiatives such as the recent addition of on-campus broadband access to foreign language television stations mentioned above. Analogous committees of administrators exist to ensure clear channels of communication between general staff and OIT.
Some IT services are offered outside OIT. Certain departments have staff dedicated to providing domain-specific support. These include the College Library, Alumni Relations Office, Development Office, and the Department of Computer Science. The Office of Public Affairs has Web support personnel. The Faculty Center for Media Technologies is a small faculty-administered program that allocates modest funding for faculty pursuing research projects with a substantial technology component. There is a student-operated site (Williams Students Online) that provides a variety of additional Web services to students (a face book, discussion boards, and so on).
Regarding the part of the standard that requires clear policies on illegal or inappropriate use, the appended statement has full details.
Overall, we have come a long way in the last decade, and our systems now serve our mission well. They are reliable, and our instructional activities are myriad. We provide opportunities for students and faculty to use and create digital media, which we see as becoming increasingly important dimensions of general information literacy. Technology will give our graduates alternative means of expression and of demonstrating and communicating ideas, along with a set of tools to continue their learning throughout their lives.
There continue to be many good things, however, that we have chosen not to provide. Limitations on staff time are one big reason. A major example is that we have not done as much one-on-one training as desirable. More such training, especially at the time of computer upgrades and software installation, would pay off in reducing demands on the help desk and the STCs. In the 2002 faculty survey, 74 per cent preferred individual training to self instruction, OIT workshops, on-line instruction, and learning from students. We would like, but have not yet been able, to increase the amount of on-line “self service” support for faculty, students, and alumni. There is unmet demand for help in developing or updating Websites, often very complex ones and sometimes ones created by someone who is no longer at the College. We also are unable to meet all the demand for professional quality audio and video production, for support at events (such as lectures by visiting speakers), and in-class support (such as resolving projection issues). We are limited in how much support we can give to individuals and groups using complex nonstandard systems (e.g., older versions of software, specialized editing). For their own good reasons, some people use antiquated computers or peripherals and out-of-date software, and helping users deal with them consumes much time.
We sense that while the College community uses the Web for many purposes, our culture is not as Web-centric as that of many colleges and universities. There is a question whether we should move beyond a single College home page to a variety of portals, aimed at specific audiences, to give them faster access to the information they want, and perhaps allow a single sign-on for access to all restricted data and systems.
We still have a long way to go in what we may call “green computing.” OIT will make new efforts in the future, consistent with our general initiative discussed elsewhere in the Self Study. Until now our focus has been on user education; we are researching better ways to reduce paper waste and power use in labs and classrooms — two things we could improve on without reducing the quality of computing.
Projections: We can project with confidence continued improvements. In this respect, the most important one will come from the Center for Media Initiatives in the new library building. We expect it to be an especially effective way to reach more students and faculty, and Instructional Technology has been heavily involved in planning it. The new resources the center will provide include audio and video recording studios, small group editing and collaboration rooms, various student and faculty work areas and stations, and special-purpose classrooms and meeting rooms. In addition to enhancing our capabilities in many information-technology-related functions, the space will permit more of the student-faculty interaction that is so important to us.
Desktop Systems and Networks and Systems are working on a full-scale network backup solution (it would use the network to provide full backup of a user’s computer hard drive, retained for some period such as a month). Desktop Systems is working on remote control software that will allow the help desk to view a user’s computer screen during help sessions. We are working to improve and centralize the distribution of on-demand media, such as videos, which are now stored in many places across the network with no convenient way to locate them.
In addition, we will conduct a new survey of faculty in the Fall of 2007, and will have continued activity on two matters touched on above: research on how best to improve our performance in “green computing” and internal controls required by SAS 112 and RIAA activity.
Williams College Museum of Art
The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) advances learning through lively and innovative approaches to art for the campus community and beyond. The museum acquires, maintains, conserves, and exhibits works of art. Its collections include 14,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, and new media works spanning the history of art. The collections are especially strong in historic and contemporary American art, Indian and Persian miniature painting and sculpture, Spanish and Italian Renaissance painting, and twentieth-century photography. The museum also houses more than 400 works by Maurice and Charles Prendergast as well as the Prendergast archives, making WCMA the largest repository of their work in the world. Areas of greatest anticipated growth through gifts and purchases include early American modernism, traditional African arts, and global contemporary art with special interest in the work of artists of African descent and artists from Asia.
We follow acquisition practices advanced by the American Association of Museums. Since storage space is limited and care of the collections is costly, two principles guide acquisitions: artistic quality and potential value for teaching. Acquisitions are reviewed and approved by the Acquisitions Committee, made up of museum staff, art faculty, and administrators. Recommendations are forwarded to the President and approved by the Board. While most acquisitions are generated through alumni gifts, a modest acquisition endowment enables us to purchase art each year in support of the curriculum.
WCMA catalogued the collection in 1994, and in 2006 published a new handbook for the collection, Encounter, the first in 27 years (in Team Room). Ensuring ready access to the collection is a core value of the museum and is facilitated through exhibiting and loaning the collections, a program of publications, and electronic information sharing. We take a generous view of lending, especially to other colleges and small regional museums, and we rotate many collection galleries throughout the year. Exhibitions are the most common way a museum shares its collection, and we present about 25 each year.
Central to the exhibition program are collaborations with faculty tied to a particular course. Indeed, the museum has recently expanded the number of major exhibitions developed jointly by faculty and curatorial staff, with emphasis on team-curated exhibitions involving faculty from several departments. Subjects traverse the history of art, and the scale of the exhibitions ranges from tightly focused exhibitions of a handful of major works to challenging, thematic ones that encourage visitors to question how images shape cultural value, affecting the way we think, feel, and behave. For example, Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (2006) considered how aesthetic decisions made by photojournalists when depicting human suffering can create empathy or even ambivalence in a viewer.
WCMA has shared programs with the Chapin Library, Kidspace at MASS MoCA (a teaching and learning space for elementary-school-age children, operated in collaboration with the Clark Art Institute), the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, and the Williamstown Theater Festival.
We regard education as the heart of a teaching museum. The cornerstone of the education program is the Rose Study Gallery — a special museum classroom used each year by about 35 classes from across the disciplines. This past year, the museum’s Mellon Curator evaluated the program (including with external advice) and doubled its staff to include one curator/educator to work with faculty in this classroom and one curator to work on exhibitions emerging from teaching experiences. In addition to their involvement in classroom education and independent study opportunities, students play a key role in the development of WCMA’s overall education program. In the past year our 50 Museum Associates, undergraduate volunteers who create and implement projects, created a new preschool reading program in the galleries and provided tours shaped with public-school curriculum goals in mind. The Museum Associates program is over 20 years old and has been replicated by many college museums nationally. WCMA also has a summer internship program that provides an alternative learning opportunity by engaging undergraduate and graduate students in every aspect of its operations from curating exhibitions to public relations. This year’s summer program employed 14 students who learned a range of skills from how to install a Picasso painting to how to write meaningful label texts for a general audience.
Projecting into the future, the most important challenge facing the museum is the limitations of its physical plant. Storage is now inadequate in size for the burgeoning collection, climate control in some galleries requires an overhaul, and faculty requests for use of the Rose Gallery exceed its capacity. In the Fall of 2007, the museum will begin to lay the groundwork for a master plan and relate it to future building needs. We will begin by asking, “What role will art play in teaching at Williams over the next decade and what spaces are required to support that role?” We will ask faculty, students, administrators, alumni, and colleagues all to participate in these discussions.
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