MEETING MINUTES

Present: Fernando Armstrong-Fumero, Mary Ellen Birkett, Eric Brewer, John Davis, Gary Felder, Jamie Hubbard, Thomas Laughner, Eric Loehr, Herb Nickles

Absent: John Brady, Roisin O’Sullivan, and Melissa Choyce

Guests: Joanne Cannon and Barbara Pliska

Approval of December 16th minutes

The December 16th minutes were approved as written.

CET Symposium update –Tom Laughner & Joanne Cannon

Joanne Cannon presented an overview of the upcoming CET symposium to the committee. It will be titled “The Digital Scholar” and will be divided into three tracks: The New Cartographer, Researcher 2.0, and International Technologies. The symposium will be May 4-6^th and the sessions will be designed in such a way that faculty can move back and forth between the tracks and at some points all the groups will meet together. The notifications regarding the symposium have gone out to faculty and already many have signed up, but there is still room for more to participate so Joanne asked the committee to advertise the symposium to their colleagues. She thanked the members of the CET who worked with ETS to create this symposium. CET will underwrite the expenses for food, some equipment, and John Davis said his office would pay faculty stipends for attendees as usual.

FCAP Standards for FY2010 – Barbara Pliska

Barbara Pliska, Manager of the Computer Store, gave the committee her recommendations for FCAP standards for computer equipment for FY2010. She said she had been asked to consider upgrades to the Dell 960 to 320GB hard drive and 20” monitor. Herb and John said that with the current economic challenges and the proposed increase of equipment replacement cycle from 4 years to 5 years, this might not be the time to make these enhancements. The committee said that if the replacement cycle increased it might be even more important to increase the system hard drives and also the Apple desktop came with 20” monitor as the standard. Barbara suggested that for an additional $20 per unit she could increase the hard drive to 250GB and the monitor to 20”. This was considered an acceptable compromise by the committee and they approved this change. Barbara also noted that the only units that would come with Computrace from now on would be the student systems; it had proven an unnecessary expense for administrative machines. She said that FY2010 would be a pilot year for the Dell Netbook Latitude 2000 which the Store will sell but ITS and the Science Center will not support at this time; they will simply be available to give advice.

Project Bamboo briefing – Tom Laughner

Tom presented the committee with an online introduction to Project Bamboo which is focused on scholarship in the area of the humanities. This is a project which has been funded by a grant from the University of Chicago and Cal.Berkeley. Tom has attended meetings in California, Arizona, and Rhode Island over the past couple years as this project is getting organized and he said that at the last meeting in Rhode Island the project finally was becoming clearer. It will be focused in three areas: 1) The Forum- a data sharing area, 2) The Cloud- an area where services can be shared, and 3) Bamboo Labs- an interactive workspace.

Tom said that Smith can be involved in this project by maintaining a “seat at the table”, contributing people, equipment, and money to the project, or just be users as the project progresses. John Davis noted that the two faculty members who attended the first couple meetings were not expressing interest in going forward at this time. Tom wondered if he should take this same presentation to members of the Smith faculty and explain how it could be useful to them depending upon where they are in their careers. The committee agreed that it would be best to wait and see what happens with this project in the future and thanked Tom for his presentation.

Discussion about closing CFLAC and Jahnige labs and the proposal to reduce the budget for CET grant initiatives

Herb told the committee that when he researched the number of public computers Smith makes available to students in relationship to the other schools we compare ourselves with; Smith had a much greater number. He decided on CFLAC and Jahnige because statistically they showed the lowest use. ITS is working with the library to move reserve materials from CFLAC to the library. Other video and audio materials will be moved to the CMP in Alumnae Gym. There will need to be some work done to the facilities in Alumnae Gym prior to moving staff there from these other areas; there are outstanding issues with water leaking and mold which will need to be addressed first.

Herb told the committee that the initial proposal before ACRA & CMP to reduce the CET grant budget by $50K was not acceptable as there are no alternative sources of monies for faculty initiatives. The equipment budget for next year will be $37,500.

ITS Budget Cuts for FY2010 – Herb Nickles

Herb said that initially he thought that ITS would have to cut 5FTE’s; now it appears to be 4, 1 from ETS and 3 from other departments. Some will happen in FY10 and some in FY11. A total budget reduction of $600,000 will be made up of savings from contract renegotiations, wiping out all contingency budgets, increasing the equipment replacement cycle from 4 years to 5 years, sharing the cost of one IT Director with Five Colleges, Inc., and savings from revenues from the lease of dark fiber from the fiber optic network.

John Davis announced that a new Executive Director of Five Colleges, Inc. was named today. He is Dr. Neal Abraham, Executive Vice President at DePauw University. He will begin his new duties at the end of summer.

Email Storage Space – Herb Nickles

Herb said briefly that the current quota for email storage is 500MB per person but that if someone made a good case for needing an increase in storage space, ITS usually could make that happen. ITS had decided not to increase everyone’s capacity because it would create the need for more storage equipment at a time when budgets are tight.

The next meeting will be May 19th in Stoddard Hall G4 conference room.

Respectfully submitted,

Constance McGinn, recorder