Inauguration Date Set CEREMONY WILL BE IN SEPTEMBER

DAVID SKORTON WILL BE INAUGURATED AS CORNELL'S twelfth president in an installation ceremony on the Arts Quad on Thursday, September 7--weather permitting. (If the always unpredictable Ithaca weather is uncooperative, the inauguration will move indoors to Barton Hall.) The ceremony is scheduled to begin at 3:30 PM and will be followed by a reception on the Arts Quad. Skorton, who served as president of the University of Iowa before coming to the Hill, moved into his Day Hall office on July 1. For more information, go to: http://inauguration.cornell.edu/.

New VP for AAD CHARLES PHLEGAR TOOK OFFICE ON JULY 1

IN MAY, IT WAS ANNOUNCED THAT CHARLES PHLEGAR HAD been appointed vice president for alumni affairs and development. Phlegar came to the Hill from Johns Hopkins University, where he had worked since 2000. He was serving as the interim vice president for development and alumni relations at Hopkins when tapped for the Cornell job. In a statement, President David Skorton praised Phlegar's record of achievement, saying that "his ongoing successes and leadership in development coordination and campaign fundraising, along with his notable record of fostering collaboration between academic and alumni development units, give him a strong base for success here at Cornell, as the University looks forward to a new capital campaign."

Phlegar, who holds bachelor's and master's degrees from Virginia Tech, has also held fundraising positions at the University of South Carolina and East Carolina University. On July 1, he took over from Laura Toy, who was named interim vice president for alumni affairs and development after the resignation of Inge Reichenbach in April 2005. The departure of Reichenbach, who accepted a similar position at Yale, was said to be a source of friction between former Cornell president Jeffrey Lehman '77 and the Board of Trustees. Lehman subsequently resigned as president in June 2005.

Silver Salute CAM WINS 2006 CASE AWARD

CORNELL ALUMNI MAGAZINE HAS ONCE AGAIN BEEN honored in the annual judging for Circle of Excellence awards by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). This year, CAM received a silver medal for general excellence in the category for College and University General Interest Magazines. Since 2000, CAM has won four gold, four silver, and two bronze awards in the CASE competition.

From Punch Cards to Cyberspace CORNELL'S COMPUTING HISTORY PUBLISHED ONLINE

JOHN RUDAN, MS '62, STILL REMEMBERS THE NIGHT HIS engineering class first trooped to Phillips Hall, in 1959, to run the Computing Center's gargantuan IBM 650 through its paces. They worked in pairs, punching holes in program cards, loading the cards into the computer's reader, analyzing the output, punching more cards, and then loading them into a tabulator to be printed--a process that today would take only a few taps on a keyboard.

Now director emeritus of the Office of Information Technologies, Rudan has witnessed--and sometimes made--computing history on the Hill.His new book, The History of Computing at Cornell, traces the development of campus computing from the punch-card tabulating equipment used in the 1920s to the University's Y2K strategy eighty years later. In the course of his research, Rudan took almost fifty oral histories, including his own. They are posted at www.cit.cornell. edu/computer/ history/.

Rudan's book was published by Internet-First University Press. As with all Internet-First publications, the full text is available online at the Cornell Library's D-Space site: http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/62. Those who prefer a printed book can order one through Internet-First's print-on-demand service. The print version comes with a bookmark--a replica of a punch card.

Follow That Bird WOODPECKER SEARCH SEASON ENDS, EMPTY-HANDED

TWO YEARS AFTER THE BEST CONFIRMED SIGHTING--AND one year after the public announcement that stunned the birding world--the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker remains in dispute. The 2005–06 search season ended in April with no additional sightings, though the Cornell-led effort did tally four possible sightings, one by a volunteer and three by members of the public, during six months of scouring the 550,000-acre Big Woods area of Arkansas. At a media teleconference on May 18, Ron Rohnbaugh, director of the Lab of Ornithology's Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Research Project, reported that the team members were "somewhat disappointed" with the results of this year's search, which employed twenty full-time staff and cost an estimated $1 million.

Nevertheless, the Lab of O plans to hit the woods again next November; organizers intend to cut costs in the future by relying largely on trained volunteers and automated recording devices in their efforts to confirm the existence of a breeding pair of ivory-bills. "We still have a lot of hope that there might be a pair," Rohnbaugh said.