Academic Technology Podcast - Episode 11

Kimberly: Hello and welcome to the eleventh episode of the Academic Technology Podcast. I'm Kimberly Hayworth, the manager of Academic Computing's Consulting and Multimedia Services group.
Today's episode includes and interview with Chris Bourg Head of the Information Center of Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources, or SULAIR. Chris and I will be discussing the Information Technology Open House. Thanks for coming in today, Chris. So what is the IT Open House?

Chris: The IT Open House is the Information and Technology Open House and it's the one event of the year where virtually all of the information and technology service providers from around campus gather in one place and Stanford community members can come and find out about all the kinds of services that are available on campus to meet their information and technology needs, and talk to the experts and talk to the providers. And it's all in one place, here in Green and Meyer library.

Kimberly: That's great. When is that happening?

Chris: November 1st, from 10 o'clock til 2 PM.

Kimberley: Do you have to be there the whole time?

Chris: No, come when you can. And we specifically hold it during those hours so folks who can only get free on their lunch hour can come by on their lunch hour. There's plenty to see, you could spend the whole time going through the event and get a lot out of it, but if you just have a half hour or an hour you'll still find plenty of information that will be useful to you.

You can go to http://itopenhouse.stanford.edu and find all of the services that will be represented are listed there and all of the events that are going on that day are also listed with times. There are a number of really cool events going on. There's a tour of Green library, there are demonstrations of the library's robotic book scanner and there's a Q&A session, a question and answer session, on the library's Google book search project where you can learn more about Stanford's contract with Google to scan the collections of the Stanford's libraries. There are also our very skilled Academic Technology Specialists Program is putting on a number of demos and short presentations that will be available about some of the projects they are working on with faculty to bring technology into the classroom and into research. There are also a number of vendors that are part of the campus wide agreement program that will be here to demonstrate some of their new products, both hardware and software all kinds of products, Dell is coming, Apple will be here and many of the other vendors that work here with Stanford.

Kimberly: And are the vendors bringing any type of prizes or…?

Chris: Prizes! There are plenty of prizes that will be given away. There will be raffles throughout the day. Anyone who attends the event can register for the raffle and we will be raffling a number of prizes. The vendors are bringing some prizes. I know for sure there will be a MacBook laptop computer that will be raffled off. There will be other prizes from the various vendors. The libraries will be also raffling off several books by Stanford authors that are signed by the authors and a number of other prizes that will be raffled off throughout the day.

Kimberly: Ok well that sounds like and amazing event. Thanks so much Chris for being today with us today.

Links to information discussed in this podcast and other show notes are available online at http://acomp.stanford.edu/cams Just click the Academic Technology Podcast link. You'll also find a link to our blog if you'd like to provide feedback or suggest topics for future podcasts.