Minutes
March 22, 2007
Owen Astrachan, Pakis Bessias, John Board, Tammy Closs, Ken Hirsh for Dick Danner, Tracy Futhey, Chris Gelpi, Susan Gerbeth-Jones, Michael Goodman, John Pormann for Craig Henriquez, Rick Hoyle, Bob Newlin for David Jamieson-Drake, Roger Loyd, Dan Murphy, Tim Bounds for Caroline Nisbet, George Oberlander, Lynne O’Brien, Mike Pickett, Rafael Rodriguez, Dalene Stangl, Molly Tamarkin, Trey Turner III, Robert Wolpert
Guests: Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications; Kevin Davis, Ginny Cake, Klara Jelinkova and Chris Cramer, OIT
Start time : 4:06
Announcements: 1 – Klara Jelinkova – Seth Vidal, who is involved in Linux@Duke, is leaving OIT. Obviously OIT is going to continue supporting it. We’re going to replace the position, but it’s an opportunity for the Linux@Duke community to step back and think about how we can do this in a collaborative way. Seth has been a dominant, prominent voice and we probably won’t find one like that again. It may be time to see if others want to step forward and contribute and perhaps develop a slightly different community.
2 – Chris Cramer – RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is proposing to sue students. Prior to suing students, one step is notifying universities that there is a student on campus they’re likely to sue. Their pre-subpoena notices say, we’re looking for information on an IP address, please preserve information related to that address. Then they will send the university settlement offers directing the recipient to visit a Web page and provide some information.
Duke has received about 17 pre-subpoena notices. We got a handful yesterday and for two of them we actually do have information. The others we don’t have information on.
Tracy Futhey – We have a 14 day retention policy.
Tracy – We have been working on it for a couple of weeks. There are pros and cons. Reasonable people agree there are advantages and disadvantages to passing them along. Wisconsin is the only school that says they won’t pass them along. We have talked along both lines but haven’t concluded that. We expect we may want to move this up to the president’s group. Legal affairs, student affairs, other groups have weighed in. We want to make sure it’s Duke’s position, not the OIT position, and that we’re considering privacy and other issues. We could need a policy in five minutes because as soon as we get that notice, there’s something like 14 days to go to the Web page and enter your information.
Molly Tamarkin – Is there any case where we act as an agent for a third party?
Chris – To my knowledge there is no instance of that.
Chris Gelpi – If and when we pass these messages along, my concern is that if Duke is passing this along that Duke will be sending them a message that we think you ought to do this. I wonder if we could say we’re passing this along but we’re not telling you what to do.
Chris Cramer – Based on what we’re seeing, students don’t actually read any emails that come from Duke. So even if we preface this in big bold letters saying go find an attorney, they won’t read it.
John Board – The content of the cover letter that would go with this forwarding is in discussion, too.
Tracy – Cornell is working on a letter that seems to cover the issues pretty well. Others say it might be too long.
Chris Cramer – I don’t know what the letter format is or anything, but there’s a week to 10 days timeline between the time of the pre-subpoena letter and the settlement announcement.
3 – Mike Pickett – This is for those of you who read the article in the Chronicle. A couple of weeks ago Peter, Kevin and I talked about ePrint. We agreed we’d do a soft quota as a first step toward getting it under control. When Kevin and I talked to DSG last night, we discussed it. They had lots of questions. Elliott supported the soft quota idea and said they’d vote on it next week.
In the Chronicle, it looks like a hard quota – it’s not. The paper is not entirely correct. It’s essentially what we talked about two weeks ago. As soon as we have an agreement with DSG, we’ll pass it along. The soft quota is set at 1,800 pages, for duplex that’s 3,600 pages. Students get warnings at 75% to call the Help Desk and get more if necessary. They can get 500 pages, or 1,000 double-sided.
I. Student Computer Labs Update – Kevin Davis
Kevin Davis – Last year at ITAC I talked about updating the labs on a four-year cycle instead of three years. This is essentially the pause summer, so there won’t be a lot going on. But there are some interesting trends and data from what we’ve seen.
The Perkins OIT facility has closed and the library has opened a large, active center. It’s a place students feel comfortable congregating and studying in the overnight hours. We’ve been working with the library on making sure students get consistent services. We have student workers there.
[References summary graph he’s passed out.]
For Fall 2006, this shows how many hours a day the average computer was used. The library workstations are used heavily, eight to nine hours a day. Next to that are some of the OIT labs. The kiosks have been very popular. Seven minutes is the average login. This has become a good way for students to get email access or check their schedule.
The Linux stations in Pratt are used a lot. At the bottom of the graph is the Linux lab on the first floor of the Soc/Psych building.
Macs aren’t getting as much use in the labs. We’re not at the point where there’s a 50-50 split that would call for some big changes, but we want to keep an eye on it.
Obviously given the intense use in the library, it would be great if we have plenty of spaces available to meet that computing need and if students have access to computing resources.
As for usage of computing classroom spaces, we’re finding that that lab is booked from 8 a.m. almost solid through the 6 o’clock hour. That’s a burden, both for the turnaround time and for students getting access to what’s there between classes.
Among our projects is turning the Soc/Psych computer lab – it’s currently Linux – into a Windows or other type of lab. Planning for that would be between OIT and Molly’s group. That would relieve the Old Chemistry lab and give access to instructional technology applications. Those Linux workstations would be redistributed to excess space around campus – dorm labs or other spaces.
We’ve also had conversations with Pratt folks to find ways to better publicize the Carr and Soc/Psych workstations.
One other possible change – distant on the horizon – we’ve had early conversations with Pratt about the use of Hudson workstations. They’re used a lot, but mostly for dropping in and checking email. We may make that a Windows lab. That needs to go before the Pratt faculty IT committee. The Soc/Psych and Carr Linux stations are underutilized to the point where they can absorb the Hudson users.
Robert Wolpert – I assume you’re planning to ignore Vista until summer ’08.
Kevin – That is true.
Ken Hirsh – Are you considering using the hybrid iMac and Windows computers?
Kevin – These would be dual logins. The space is small and the cooling isn’t available for more.
Question – Are you considering virtualization on some of those machines?
Kevin – We haven’t thought about that for now, but it’s something we can take a look at.
III. Perkins Library Teaching and Learning Space
Molly Tamarkin – [passes out floor plan.] It’s currently called the Teaching and Learning Center, or the Teaching and Learning Lab. We’re not sure what it’s going to finally be called. It’s a 25,000 sq. ft. space on the lower level of Perkins. The project came out of library, it’s being done by facilities with support from Jim Roberts. The stakeholders are the library, A&S and OIT.
We’re using the space as a testing ground for using technology as we look to renovate classroom spaces on West and Central campus. There are seven classrooms, five seminar rooms, 13 group study areas, open seating areas and spaces for small group work. It also has a significant help desk and support staff there. The fact that support staff will be located in this space makes it a good place to try out new things and experiment with new ways of teaching and new technologies.
The location is also just down the hall from CIT, making that nice for CIT and their mission.
That’s a rough overview. We just got feedback from some faculty on some designs and floor plans. We’re looking to get funding and formal approval at the board meeting in June, then go live in fall of ’08.
Some of concerns people have, particularly with classroom and computer access on West Campus, will be alleviated. It won’t be another computer classroom, but it’ll relieve pressure on places adjacent to Perkins.
It should be a vibrant, attractive location.
Robert Wolpert – Are there any computers in there?
Molly – There is no traditional computer lab in this plan, no space like that. There will be computers in consoles for teaching; will be computers available for checkout; we’re also planning to have computers available for classes to check out.
Mike Pickett – What about video?
Molly – Those rooms have been designed to higher acoustical standards for video and production editing. You could record and edit a podcast. In larger rooms you could do larger group presentations. All of them will have the ability to take cameras into, but these three rooms will be made for that.
It’s a big space and it’s expensive to build. We’re focusing on enabling infrastructure for conferencing, videoconferencing, wireless, etc.
Mike – What about power outlets for laptop use?
Molly – We’ll have strategically located floor outlets as well as a grid of power along the wall. One thing that came up yesterday from Todd Larsen was the idea of making one of the larger rooms have a tile floor to allow destructive demonstrations and allowing power pull-downs from the ceiling. The cloud is going to have a grid overhead, so that’s one of the ideas. Power is a problem. One of goals for this facility is for the space to be as flexible as possible. You’ll be able to move furniture, collapse tables. When you orient things like projectors you’re saying, this is the front of this room.
We talked about some things being able to be plugged into the furniture. In seating areas, power could come up through tables.
Trey Turner – Will any of these include green screens?
Molly – We put a green screen in the larger space of the three down at the bottom of the floor plan. I don’t know about storage for the lights.
John Board – Will there be changes to class reservation system that will allow people to map themselves spaces in this lab?
Molly – All spaces will be able to be reserved, and able to be used when not reserved. I want to solve that through the classroom strategic plans. As far as instructional spaces, we have some in A&S where it’s hard for faculty to know whose space they’re in, who supports what, how to reserve a space, and how to get another space if that one’s not available.
Lynne O’Brien – One of the things driving decision making is a desire to encourage flexible space and more flexible approaches to teaching and learning. Our hopes are that faculty will use large rooms as large rooms and other days use breakout rooms because you’ll be working in teams or collaboratively.
I wanted to mention a little plug about an event on April 26, our annual instructional technology showcase. Martin Brown will be talking about how teaching will be transformed through transformed learning spaces.
We’re hoping that that will be the launch of a full year of planning to take advantage of this space.
The keynote talk is at 11, then right after we will do a lunch with 20 to 30 people. We hope that that will be the kickoff of an invitation to faculty to see how we can best work with them to figure out how to best use this space.
The idea is not that people will be scheduled in a room three times a week for a full semester.
Trey – It’s a lot easier to go in at the first of the semester and just reserve your room.
Molly – Another question that’s a little bit of a culture change is trying to do flexible furniture. When you walk into a room there’s no one way that the room should be oriented. There is no “photo,” whatever way is fine. Except I see faculty coming in to the classrooms and they will have screens, whiteboards, furniture everywhere. You can see this creep on your time into arranging the furniture, getting the whiteboards ready. Those things concern me. We’re enabling this freedom but bringing on these new tasks.
Lynne – There are precedents for that around the country.
Robert – We have a room in Old Chem that is used sometimes in rows and sometimes as a seminar and it’s not a big deal to move back and forth.
John – How close is this to being a final plan?
Molly – I think the number of rooms and the shape of rooms is fixed. We’ve specced out a basic tech package for the rooms; that will be changed over time. I think if there’s a structural change necessary, we need to hear that now because they’re trying to get an estimate for building that space. If you have feedback on storage, etc. other changes, we need to hear them.
IV. Scholarly Communications Office Update – Kevin Smith
Kevin Smith – I’m basically here to give you an update on things my office is doing. We’re starting to figure that out. Probably the majority of my time is spent consulting with individuals, faculty and students about various issues. The majority is copyright, but some is about protecting rights in new creations.
I recently consulted with a faculty member who wanted to put together a film series with students about global health. He was told he couldn’t without buying a license. We worked out some parameters that allowed for him to do that and it was within copyright exceptions. So we worked with him to find out how he could do the things he wanted to do.
Another thing that’s new is this website and blog for the Scholarly Communications office. It’s new for me to build a website around a blog. This has worked well. It’s allowed me to be very flexible. There are tabs for different issues. One thing I’ve liked is that I can put up a post on a specific issue and link it to one of these static pages.
This website has started to generate attention. I’m getting conversation from other institutions. I got a ping back from a blog that’s run from the Philippines. The people in the digital projects department have done wonderful things to help me.
I’ve done about 25 presentations to various campus groups, mostly classes talking about copyright or scholarly communications. A film class had concerns about using other people’s work and protecting their own work. I’m also having a lot of policy discussions, and talked with the full Academic Council. I want to create a campus-wide copyright policy to guide faculty when putting things into Blackboard or other websites for public use. It helps to have policy in place.
Another thing is I’ve been trying to do advocacy work. If you look at the blog, it has a lot to do with issues that arise about publications, the Fair Use Act, which has a lot to do with circumvention rules and the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), orphan works, database protections.
Also Chris Simmons from the Federal Relations Office and I and a couple of others went to a conference on public access to federally funded research that’s generated a lot of discussion on campuses.
We’re doing a lot with digitized music and digital reserves. I think it’s a place where it’s worth pushing the envelope, but we want to do it intelligently.
On the website, the tabs lead to actual questions I’ve been asked. So the website is there and available. You can subscribe as an RSS feed or email. Other people also will be blogging on the site.
John Board – One item in the news this week, MIT is dropping a journal subscription because they think the requirements for the online database are too onerous. It’s from the Society for Automotive Engineering.
Kevin – We don’t subscribe to that, but I passed that along to others because the issue is likely to come up in other places where we do subscribe. Some of authors are also unhappy with kinds of licenses they have to sign to get articles into that database.
Lynne O’Brien – We have had a steady flow of people through Kevin’s office who’ve asked us about different issues. So it’s been helpful for Kevin to be here to answer those questions and to do more proactive planning. So we’re trying to figure out how to get film and audio in downloads without violating laws.
We also want to be able to submit theses and dissertations electronically.
Kevin – We’ve done about 40 or 50. We’re capturing them just before they’re sent to Proquest. They will be available open access. We will have to write a license for students so we can do that. They have to make a lot of decisions regarding their own copyright, so we’ve written them some guidelines. The goal is next year to make it so anyone who wants to submit electronically can do that. That saves them money and saves the library the labor of having to bind those things.
Before we make it mandatory, though, we have to have a process for students who don’t want their work to be open access because of potential publications or patents.
Molly Tamarkin – What format are you storing those in?
Kevin – I’m not sure. I think they’re pdf files.
Roger Loyd – They’re still being cataloged and added to the database.
John Board – I just got the hard copy of a dissertation from April 2005, last week in the mail.
Kevin – Yes, the cost and time savings, not to mention the paper, are significant.
V. Policies and practices related to personal Web space, file and email services after leaving Duke – Chris Cramer
Chris Cramer – There are a number of areas where this might be relevant, but the place where we’ve had the most issues is with personal Web pages. We’ve always allowed anyone who has access to AFS to put up a Web page – students, staff, anyone. There have been a handful of cases where there’s a question about what’s on a website. People in the community don’t recognize that these are personal websites, not official Duke speech.
There are a number of things we could do. One of the things we’ve found is that many of the complaints deal with sites of people who’ve left Duke. So we could do a more timely removal of these pages.
Robert Wolpert – The complaints might come a year later, and the people don’t even have access by that time.
Chris – One of things we’re not doing is an automatic termination of these services, where sometime in May or June we say, OK, who should be removed.
Klara Jelinkova – We have done work for automatic NetID deactivation, so we should deprovision services, too.
Mike Pickett – So not only the Web space, but also the file space.
Chris – Absolutely, Web space, file space, dCal, everything.
So one thing is just the more timely removal of services.
A second thing is, are there things we should do to indicate these personal websites are personal. It’s quite possible to have personal.Duke.edu URLs. That’s a low bar for notification that these are personal websites, but we could also put on the main page a notice that says these are personal websites.
I wanted to talk to folks to see if there are thoughts on making it more apparent that these are not Duke.
John Board – For staff, you’re deprovisioned as soon as you’re terminated. For students, there’s a year or so. For faculty, there’s no timeline.
Chris – That would be easy enough to do. The NetID deprovisioning has an arbitrary timeline, so that’s easy to do.
Klara – One component is the awareness of the people who are putting up the content. One thing is to put it up for the person doing the page. Then putting something up on the website for the readers to make sure the readers understand.
John – Some of what’s on those pages is canonical. There are official things in those spaces.
Chris – It’s a little bit of a problem to have those groups tied to NetIDs. I do agree that we need to have some definitions on timing. I didn’t know if this was the right forum for that discussion.
Chris Gelpi – With a one-year window, I don’t know how likely the prospect would be of coming back from sabbatical and saying, where’s my stuff. With a two-year window that would avoid that.
Tracy Futhey – This would be keyed off of SAP or PeopleSoft. If someone’s on sabbatical, they’re not marked as terminated.
John – But it may be a problem. Do we back that up?
Chris Cramer – We can do that if we automate.
Robert Wolpert – If we’re not recycling the NetIDs, we can offer them a redirect, and send them a DVD with all their information on it and kiss them goodbye.
Klara – Redirection is feasible. I don’t know about the DVDs.
Chris Cramer – We could probably pretty easily generate an ISO file and say you can go here and burn a DVD if you want one. We could keep that archived indefinitely if we wanted to.
John – Are sensibilities such that we need some explicit statement on these websites?
Mike – I know a complaint came in two months ago. It went to Peter and I talked to Chris. Peter’s issue isn’t so much that it’s not labeled as personal. His issue was, do we have a process for taking down websites once people do leave the university, and are we using that process? I think that would satisfy him.
My sense is that there are a lot of things that aren’t necessarily IT issues. If what’s there is violating the policies, that’s not an IT issue.
Chris Cramer – Separating out personal websites from Duke.edu may have some benefits for Duke.
Klara – That’s a separation for the infrastructure, rather than the separation of the website. It’s really a question of how you want to send that message.
John – I’d be more inclined to do it for technical and performance issues than for content issues.
Robert – There’s an undercurrent of censorship issues that we should avoid. One issue is that personal pages show up in searches. Is there a way to avoid that?
Chris – That hits my sensibilities much more than labeling it, saying we won’t let it show up in the search.
Statement – If it comes back in search results from Duke’s main page there’s more of a likelihood people will think it’s a Duke page.
Chris Cramer – That happened in one case, where someone had a lacrosse page that came up pretty high.
Tracy – Once every month or two we get something that comes into you where someone’s complaining.
Chris Cramer – Someone has always stated that we would like to reserve the right to be offensive. Do we want to deal with this at all? Or do we just want to get rid of the old pages we have?
John – Do we still have students running IP addresses on servers somewhere?
Chris Cramer – Yes.
John – What do you need from us? Escalating the faculty part now.
Chris Cramer – If the general feeling is that we don’t want to create a personal space for these pages, at least not for these reasons, then I think we can drop that one for now. I’d like to look at what happens when we deprovision. Can we pursue options of looking at archival ISOs? Or the possibility of doing a redirect?
Robert – Frequently people will think, oh I know him, and they’ll try to go to a webpage for that person. The best possible outcome is that the attempt to find the person will lead them to where the person is now.
Ken Hirsh – What about non-faculty staff?
Statement – There are all sorts of informal relationships where people can be a consultant, etc.
Tracy – That all comes back for us to what gets entered into SAP.
Chris Cramer – The understanding we have right now for non-faculty staff is for termination of services after the last day of work. One thing we could have in place is that if there is this consultation role they could be put into an affiliate role. That way their IDs, their email would continue to run.
Ken – At the Law School we had a policy that talked about what happened to files but didn’t talk about email so we recently added an email policy.
Chris Cramer – That’s why we haven’t turned on the technical implementation on that yet. We have to work that out.
Tracy – So in a sense we would be moving to a third authorization system.
Chris Cramer – Correct. Currently if you become an affiliate, you can be one forever unless someone actually tells us to end that.
Robert – We have an annual renewal and there has to be a sponsor.
Klara – The fact that you’re an affiliate doesn’t mean you’re going to get your Web space and email. It would have to be on a case-by-case basis.
Chris Cramer – We will wait to hear from John.
John – We will wait to hear more.
Tracy – One comment that came out – Chris you referenced that there are students who have satic IP addresses. We have the 14-day retention policy, but for any student, faculty or staff who has a static IP address, it’s permanent.
Chris Cramer – Any faculty or staff member for whom there is an allegation of copyright infringement, Duke is liable. For students if there’s a static IP address, we maintain that for a semester or a year. Others only apply to the NetReg system.
The policies are going to be different everywhere. Students who have registered IP addresses and who have allegations against them are in a worse position. I think we let students know when they request such a thing that that is out there.
VI. Other Business
Mike Pickett – Do we reuse NetIDs? My sense is that that’s something that’s worth talking about as a university. The role is different than a unique ID. One has name recognition quality. Those who have IDs that are close to our own names, it has meaning. It’s different than a number.
Chris Cramer – I think it would be a good discussion. One concern is that as we have consolidated IDs across campus – DEMPO to NetID – there will be many applications where there’s a need for an archival record.
Mike – If we retain the information from five years ago, for the next Klara who comes up, we need a way to say, this NetID belonged to someone else five years ago.
Chris – We do have that. In talking with Rafael’s staff, there is a concern about that.
Mike – As a university, our lifespan is perhaps thousands of years. During the first few years it works. But 15 or 20 years from now everyone has a NetID that is 000000355. My sense is we’re going to lose something if we’re not careful.
End time : 5:27