Almanac
Kenyon's Library and Information Services Division reorganizes
K enyon's Library and Information Services (LBIS) Division (formerly known as Information and Computing Services, or ICS) has a new organizational plan, it has been announced by Vice President for Library and Information Services Daniel Temple. The division will be implementing the plan gradually in an effort to integrate the College's libraries and information-technology services.
Major objectives of the plan, which features a high level of focus on the division's constituent groups of students and members of the administration, faculty, and staff, are:
- to group together services that focus mainly on student access to information and technology;
- to separate the responsibility for systems design from the responsibility for systems management; and
- to offer faculty members special help in developing innovative or experimental instructional technologies.
The reconfigured division will have five departments: Information Access, Information Resources, Systems Design and Consulting, Administrative Applications and Systems Management, and Advanced Technology. The directors of these departments, who will report to Temple, will form the management and leadership team for the division.
Following national searches, the directorships of the Information Resources and Information Access departments were recently filled, respectively, by Frank Wojcik, library sytems manager for the Five Colleges of Ohio, and Oscar H. Will III, a visiting professor of biology and faculty mentor for academic technology at Kenyon. The three directors in the former ICS division, Ronald Griggs, Scott Siddall, and Glen Turney, will lead, respectively, the Systems Design and Consulting, Advanced Technology, and Administrative Applications and Systems Management departments.
"The Information Access Department represents an explicit integration of some library and computing services functions," Temple notes. It will be made up from parts of the libraries and parts of ICS that enable students (and others, but mostly students) to access information, including audiovisual services, circulation, classroom technology, the computer help line, computing laboratories and classrooms, interlibrary loan, and the Olin and Chalmers libraries as a facility. "All computing and information intensive facilities--the libraries, labs, and classrooms--will now be managed as parts of a whole service with a single management viewpoint," Temple adds. "The search for a director of information access focused on candidates with management experience and excellent leadership talent."
The Information Resources Department will be made up of archives and special collections, the faculty liaison program, government documents, library reference, library technical services (acquisitions, serials, and cataloging), the music library, and the slide collection. "A particularly important responsibility of the director of this department will be to provide leadership as our collection policies and practices evolve in this era of networked information and consortial approaches to collection sharing," says Temple. "The search for a director of information resources focused on candidates with library management experience, as well as experience in various areas of library services."
Griggs, presently director of networks, systems, and technical services, will focus on faculty consulting, library automation, planning and design of technology based information systems, and technical support of other areas of LBIS. He and his staff will assist faculty members in their use of Kenyon's technology services and in their preparation for and utilization of new services as they appear. Griggs's department will try to adapt the libraries' faculty-liaison model to relations with the academic units.
Siddall, who has held the title of director of academic computing, will assume varied responsibilities, with "special faculty projects" featured. He will provide consulting assistance to individual faculty members with ideas and projects requiring experimental, innovative, and nonstandard technology applications. He will attempt to discover, encourage, and foster such projects, and he will assist in design and support areas (e.g., by helping to develop grant funding). His other areas of responsibility will include computing business operations and budgets, external and consortial activities, leadership and coordination for LBIS documentation and training, and web page consulting and design.
Turney, presently director of administrative computing applications, will add systems and network management and operations to his current responsibilities of administrative applications development and maintenance, database management, and telephone systems management and operations.
"A key strategy in this organizational plan is personal contact with members of the user communities," says Temple. "While efficiencies in helping are important--such as the help line and network maintenance of computers--the division's staff will put a premium on understanding users and dealing with their problems in personalized ways. Because this will require staff members to be conversant across a broad range of services, the plan calls for special emphasis on intradivisional communication and a shared vision of the mission of the division."
"Dan Temple and his staff have undertaken their reorganization plan in a deliberate and thoughtful fashion," says President Robert A. Oden Jr. "They are to be commended for their efforts to find the best ways in which to merge two very different cultures for the sake of a program that will address the needs of their most important campus constituencies."
Trustees elect chair and new members
C ornelia Ireland Hallinan '76, one of the first Kenyon alumnae to serve on the College's Board of Trustees, was elected that group's chair at the board meeting of April 25, 1998. When she assumed leadership of the trustees from Richard L. Thomas '53 on July 1, she became the first woman to hold the post.
"As a singularly effective Kenyon graduate who has served the College with distinction in a number of roles, Buffy Hallinan is a singularly appropriate choice for this new leadership role," says President Robert A. Oden Jr. "Kenyon students and recent graduates will know her best from her service as chair of the board's Student Life Committee, a role she has fulfilled in ways that have benefited the College beyond measure."
A psychology major at Kenyon, Hallinan stayed on at the College for two years after graduation as a member of the admissions staff before joining the University of Rochester as assistant director of admission from 1978 to 1982. Her sister, Lucy Ireland Weller, is also a 1976 graduate of Kenyon, while her husband, Robert Hallinan, senior counsel with the Investment Law Division of Teachers Insurance and Annuity, is a 1974 graduate. The Hallinans live in Chappaqua, New York, with their daughters, Elizabeth (sixteen) and Tess (thirteen).
At Honors Day in 1991, Buffy Hallinan became the first alumna of the College to be awarded an honorary doctorate by Kenyon. She was recognized for her many years of service, not only as a trustee (beginning in 1978) but also as a volunteer in many other capacities. Hallinan served as a student member of the Presidential Search Committee that brought Philip H. Jordan Jr. to the College in 1975 and as chair of the Presidential Search Committee that brought Oden to Kenyon in 1995.
"Buffy was one of the first representatives of the College whom Teresa and I met when I was a candidate for the presidency," Oden notes. "Coming to know her helped make it clear to us that our decision to move to Kenyon was the right one."
Elected to the board at the April meeting were Bruce W. Duncan '73, who previously served on the board from 1987 to 1996, and James H. Brandi P'01, father of Peter B. Brandi '01. Duncan, who holds an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, is president and chief executive officer of Cadillac Fairview Corporation Limited in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Brandi, a graduate of Yale University with an M.B.A. from Harvard University, is managing director of the investment-banking firm of Dillon, Read, and Company in New York City.
In addition, three trustees were reelected to the board for six-year terms: James E. Annable Jr. '65, senior vice president and chief economist with First Chicago NBD Corporation; Craig J. Foley '65, president of Wickham Capital Corporation in Bronxville, New York; and M. Kristina Peterson '73, executive vice president of Random House Children's Publishing in New York City.
The board was also informed of the results of this year's elections for alumni trustees, which returned Jack Y. Au '73 and Neal M. Mayer '63 for second and final four-year terms. Au is executive vice president and chief credit officer of Fleet Financial Group in New York City; Mayer is a senior attorney with Hoppel, Mayer, and Coleman in Washington, D.C.
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