Work

Job: Technology Support Specialist
Job description: Work with faculty to make teaching materials available over the web, work with students and faculty with software and hardware issues, maintain the Reserves web page, work with students at the technology desk, work in the call center for tech support

From 1995-2002, I managed the Bucknell University electronic reserves system. Beginning with an HP II scanner and ERes v2, we originated a pilot project with about 10 or 15 faculty and about 50 documents. In 1996, as the pilot proved to be successfull, we upgraded to an HP 4p scanner with automatic document feeder and we hired a student (6 hours/week) to help me. We continued to grow - as evidence, our quota on the coral server was increased from 30mb to 60mb to 100mb to 300mb to 400mb over the next 3 years. In 1998, as we crossed over the 100 course line and saw our online documents increase to over 1000, we upgraded to ERes v3.1. In the fall of 1999, we increased our student hours to 2 students working 6-8 hours each. In the late summer of 2000, we migrated to ERes v4 and put the system on its own server. At the end of the 2000-2001 academic year, we had about 480 courses with material online and over 6700 documents. By the end of the 2001-2002 year, that number had increased to about 660 courses and over 9000 documents. For more details on our ERes system, please see the main Reserves page on the ISR site.

In an organization-wide restructuring, my job responsibilities changed in the fall of 2002. I now work in campus wide Tech Support, using a variety of methods to help resolve difficulties that staff and students might be having with software or hardware. ERes is now the responsibility of ITEC, primarily with Mary Beth James and Deb Balducci.

One of my main areas of support is Adobe Acrobat as a result of our experiences in creating pdf documents for e-reserves. Some examples of the type of work that I've done in this area include: Hints on working with Adobe Acrobat, sample forms for living off campus and billing for international calls, a description of how to use the form tool in Acrobat to add citations to pdf documents, and one of our e-reserve request forms.

As the SPSS support coordinator, I work to maintain our SPSS license, support faculty in their research where possible, direct faculty to appropriate support when I'm not able to provide it, maintain our SPSS support web page, and distribute SPSS software as needed.

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As a by-product of my work with traditional and electronic reserves, I've had to work with copyright issues far more than I would like. Some things that have come out of this work include a presentation on copyright at the University of Toronto DRAGNET conference, sample copyright fax coversheets and permission letters, and links to several terrific copyright sites, including Georgia Harper's site at the University of Texas.

Update 9-06-05
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