Library building plans unfold

Exterior view courtesy of Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott. More plans

We are excited to share news about long-awaited plans to renovate and expand Donnelley Library. Over the past summer, the College was successful in securing the funds that have allowed us to begin this project in earnest. Groundbreaking is scheduled for next May, immediately following Commencement.

The project, which is expected to cost $18 million, will include a new addition of 27,000 square feet and the complete renovation of the existing 45,000 square foot Donnelley Library. It will take approximately 18 months to complete. The new facility should be completed by the beginning of the 2004 fall semester.

The hallmark of the new building will be its flexibility and accessibility. There will be a minimum of permanent walls which will allow spaces to be reconfigured and designed as new needs arise. A significant portion of the building will be open twenty-four hours a day, including a cyber-café and a large computer lab.

The new building is being designed to support the convergence of "traditional" library functions with information technology. It will feature areas where print tools and electronic resources will exist side-by-side.

The building will contain several "smart" classrooms equipped for hands-on library and technology instruction. It will also feature a new and improved Technology Resource Center, updated and expanded audiovisual facilities, and ample space for the library's print collections. The lighting will be vastly improved. Many seats within the building will be designed to facilitate collaborative study, and each seat will have access to electrical outlets and data drops. A wireless network will allow students with wireless devices to connect to the campus network.

The architectural firm of Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott (SBRA), a firm with extensive experience in the design of college libraries, has been selected. SBRA architects have been working with LIT staff and a Library Task Force composed of students, faculty, trustees and administrative staff to develop plans for the new facility. The architects will be on campus weekly during the fall and spring, and there will be opportunities for members of the community to meet with them.

Plans for the new facility are now on display in Donnelley Library and online at library.lakeforest.edu/bibliofiles/building.html. We hope you will take a look at the plans and email us your comments and suggestions.

What's new at the library? Library catalog In August, the Library introduced a new version of the catalog. The previous version, produced by DRA (now SIRSI), was no longer being supported by the state-wide consortium of 44 libraries (ILCSO) that the College is a part of. The new version, which is produced by Des Plains-based Endeavor Information Systems, is a highly-regarded catalog that has also been selected as the catalog for the Library of Congress, Northwestern University, and Penn.

Pink Link
As any student or faculty member who uses Library journals can tell you, the Pink Book is a list of journals physically owned by the College. Printed on hot pink paper, these books are invaluable but difficult to use. This summer, the Library created a web-based Pink Book called the Journals List. This list not only indicates which journals the library has in print or on microfilm, it also lists which journals are available full-text online, and through which databases. Patrons need only click on the appropriate link to be led to the article they seek. This long-overdue and much-anticipated journals list has been extremely popular with returning students and a significant tool for the Library's Interlibrary Loan Department. It was developed by David Levinson, Systems Librarian & Academic Technology Specialist and Rebecca Miller, Reference Librarian, using Serials Solutions, a library product, as its backbone. Visit the Journals List at http://library.lakeforest.edu/journals

Interlibrary Loan Forms online

Get online with Pipeline

Have you hosted an online discussion for your class? Have you used an online calendar to remind students of important dates? Did you know you can send mass emails to all your students?

Last year's launching of Forester Pipeline brought with it a unified web space that allowed Lake Forest College students to check email, view transcripts and tuition balances, chat or post electronic messages with other members of a class, and stay up-to-date on College events. Many faculty also made use of class tools such as the Message Board to extend classroom discussions beyond the limits of class sessions. One of the more interesting uses of the Message Board came by way of Dennis Mae and his Interpersonal Communications class. A board was set up so that students logged in as "alternate personas" with monikers like Born-again-Betty and Nerdy Norton. The semester-long exercise enabled students to explore the emergence and subtleties of bigotry, racism, and stereotyping in an anonymous community.

New features were added this summer, including web-based calendars, Group Tools, and improved email. The Pipeline Calendar gives everyone the ability to create and manage class, school-related, and personal calendars, as well as invite others to join an event. Group Tools provides a private portal where members of a group can interact and communicate with each other with a variety of community tools, including message boards, chat, photo galleries and news postings. Any group on campus can be given access to its own Pipeline space, and members of the college community can subscribe to a group in which they are interested.

Gain access to Forester Pipeline at http://forester.lfc.edu. If you don't know your username or password, contact Jill Zwicke at 735-5068. For innovative ideas on using Pipeline for your classes, see Tech Tips.

This bookplate memorializes the donation by Herbert S. Stone of The Sister of a Saint and Other Stories. Stone was a partner in the 1890s avant garde, reform Chicago publishing venture, Stone & Kimball. The plate includes the Harvard crest in an art nouveau setting typical of the days of the original press. Learn more.

Spam: not just for breakfast anymore

Spam. Don't you just hate it? And we're not even talking about the grocery store item. We're talking about those pesky unsolicited emails that fill your inbox advertising everything from low mortgage rates to pyramid investment schemes to pornography. This past spring, the College community experienced a sharp increase in spam. Why do people send it? How do spammers get our email addresses? More to the point, what can be done about it? These are the questions many ask.

The question of "why" people send spam is the most difficult to answer. Some spammers are actually trying to find potential customers. If you think of email as an electronic version of paper mail, these folks are the bulk mailers of the Internet. Most, though, seem not to be legitimate. So why do they do it? It's unclear. Why do people vandalize? Why do kleptomaniacs steal? Most of us probably can't begin to fathom the reasons.

How do spammers get our email addresses? This is less ambiguous. Email addresses are everywhere, from business cards to online directories like the College's. Just as there are bulk mailers, there are Internet bulk mailing services that compile lists of email addresses from public sources and sell or distribute them. If you've ever received an email with any variation of "Click here to be taken off this list," do NOT click there. Doing so only lets spammers know they've hit a valid email address. Best not to respond at all.
The answer to the big question - what can be done about all this spam - is the most complicated. The ideal solution would be to have computers read email and just get ride of the spam. In a way, it is possible to just that. Most up-to-date browsers have filters. Your IT liaison can explain your options and help configure your filters.

LIT has also been investigating what can be done on the server side to filter out some of the more obvious spam. This is tricky because in an academic environment, any type of censorship is problematic. Filtering messages based on content is not really an acceptable solution. Nonetheless, there are Internet sites known to be relayers of spam. Most of these send very little legitimate email. Upgrades in software will allow us to configure servers to block all messages from these sites and to check the addresses of incoming email to make sure they are valid, rejecting those that aren't.

Another trick of spammers is to put totally bogus "From" addresses in their messages. While we can’t generally tell whether a certain username exists on a remote system, we can configure our e-mail software to check the machine name part of return addresses to make sure they are valid, and reject any that are not.

Either of these server-side actions presents some danger of rejecting legitimate e-mail, so they do increase the workload on our side in reviewing rejected messages to "rescue" the "false positives." However, we will be giving both of these things a try in the coming months to see whether the results justify the effort.

As much as we would all like to track spam back to its source and get the senders shut down, the unfortunate truth is that it is usually just not practical. Sometimes it isn't even possible. If a spammer just sends out one or two batches of spam, the information needed to track him or her down may not have been recorded anywhere. It has become so easy to change your internet service provider, or even to set up your own email server on the internet, that repeat spammers can change their information so rapidly that you can't keep up with them. Even if a spammer is not that clever, the time and effort required to trace him or her are usually prohibitive, except in cases where enough damage has been done to make it worth someone's while.

Some spam comes in the form of virus hoaxes, which scare people about viruses which actually do not exist. Beyond needlessly alarming people, these hoaxes can have the unfortunate result of making people less inclined to believe any virus warning. McAfee Security provides a list of known virus hoaxes, so you can check whether a warning you receive is legitimate or not.

The bottom line on spam: LIT will be doing what it can to remove the obvious junk, but some will continue to trickle in. Your best bet for now is to filter out what you can and delete the rest as it appears in your inbox.

Architect Profile: Geoffrey Freeman, AIA

Geoff is one of the three architects designing the new Donnelley Library. He is a Principal at Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, a national architectural firm based in Boston, and is a nationally recognized authority on library planning and design. His chief interest as an architect is in contributing to the continuing advancement of education, in how people learn, and how architecture affects the teaching and learning process. A teacher himself, Geoff worked as an Instructor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard College while earning his Masters degree in Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. His extensive client list includes more than 80 colleges and universities across the country, including Princeton University, University of Chicago, Dartmouth College, Grinnell College, Harvard University, Northwestern University, and Yale University. -Courtesy of Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott

MITC technology programs underway

Several College faculty and staff participated in MITC-sponsored events this summer. Academic Technologist Diane Snedden and Professor of Economics Carolyn Tuttle attended a week-long social sciences conference at Grinnell College. They worked on developing a template for an econometrics web module to be used in Professor Tuttle's senior seminar on American labor. Carolyn then traveled to Colorado College to share the concept of a web module to other social scientists interested in quantitative literacy and
web modules.

Assistant Professor of Art Tom Denlinger and Systems Librarian & Academic Technologist David Levinson attended a workshop on digital video in Georgetown, Texas. Diane Snedden also attended a workshop on web page development. Cory Stevens, Head of Public Services, attended a planning meeting at the Colorado College with other ACM and GLCA librarians and academic technologists.

Other faculty-led projects are already underway to work collaboratively with ACM and GLCA institutions to develop curricular materials, cross-campus projects, and to share resources. Christopher Reed, Associate Professor of Art, hosted an October symposium to bring together art and art history faculty to discuss joint projects and areas of opportunity.

Assistant Professor of Economics Allison Roberts and Diane Snedden will be working on a "learning object" or module on the value of money over time. This work will be shared at another Information Literacy Conference next summer.

A workshop held at the Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury College awarded Lake Forest College access to reduced pricing to some powerful software that will be new on our campus. Politics Professor Paul Fischer and Diane Snedden attended a workshop that introduced them to two types of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) software, its varied uses in the Social Sciences, as well as hands on experience using GPS (Geographical Positioning Systems) recording instruments. GIS software is generally regarded as very useful for Environmental and Geographical Sciences but is increasingly popular as a research tool for historians, sociologists, environmental psychologists, archeologists and economists.

While they were learning about possible uses for GIS, Paul and Diane were fortunate enough to spend 4 wonderful days at the charming Middlebury Inn and mingle with other faculty, library and technology people from the Associated Colleges of the East. One of the objectives for sending faculty to conferences such as these is to give them information they can bring back to their own campuses. A synergistic affect occurs as a result. Exposure to other liberal arts faculty and technology professionals spawns new ideas and enthusiasm for the technology tools that are available for teaching and learning. Sharing of knowledge and ideas occurs after the workshop ends and new lines of communications are opened across campuses. This is precisely the goal of the NITLE (National Institute for Technology and Learning in Education) organization. As a member of that larger group, the Midwest Technology Resource Center can make available resources that would not be available to member colleges acting as a lone institution.