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Tech Notes: Dude, Where’s My Computer Lab?

by Advocate Staff


The Grad­u­ate Center’s Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy: Musi­cal Chairs

At the start of the Spring 2007 semes­ter there will be sev­eral changes around the Grad­u­ate Cen­ter involv­ing the Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy depart­ment and ser­vices. In an effort to make IT tech­ni­cians more acces­si­ble within the library, sev­eral IT staff will be mov­ing within the library, from the C-level con­course room C408 to the library’s sec­ond floor, located behind the ref­er­ence librarian’s desk. The Assis­tive Tech­nol­ogy office, headed by Sharon Lerner, will move to the library’s first floor, to the space where the old copy machines were just beyond the cir­cu­la­tion desk.

Room C-415A, which was a com­puter class­room, is now a “smart” class­room for reg­u­lar non-computer classes. Accord­ing to Bob Camp­bell, Assis­tant Vice Pres­i­dent of Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy, this con­ver­sion was an effort to return class­room space to the stu­dents. The 20 – 25 com­put­ers that used to be in room C-415A were moved to room 6418 and now con­sti­tute a com­puter classroom.

Con­tin­u­ing the musi­cal chairs-type moves, classes that used to meet in the room adja­cent to the break­out space in the con­fer­ence hall on the C-level con­course, room C-416, have been moved to the new C-415A in an effort to remove them from poten­tial noise dis­trac­tions from con­fer­ences and events in that area.

Room C-417 is now a sem­i­nar room, another space that was con­verted over to stu­dent use; (it was for­merly used as storage).

There were numer­ous rea­sons for the room changes and switches, among them the need to make as many rooms avail­able for sched­uled classes as pos­si­ble and an attempt to locate per­son­nel in places where they would be most acces­si­ble. The con­tin­ued trend of an over­all increase in stu­dent enroll­ment was cited by Elaine Mon­tilla, Act­ing Direc­tor of User Ser­vices, as another rea­son behind the recent moves.

Bob Nel­son, Deputy Direc­tor of Stu­dent Ser­vices, said that the num­ber of stu­dents enrolled at the Grad­u­ate Cen­ter has increased steadily, from 3,567 for Fall 2000 to 4,313 for Fall 2005 — or an increase of nearly 21%.

To Com­pute or Not to Compute?

With the new com­puter class­room installed on the Sixth Floor (Room 6418), the ques­tion raised is whether this room could be used as a com­puter lab dur­ing the times when there are no class meet­ings sched­uled. The GC IT depart­ment is start­ing to explore this option, and is request­ing some stu­dent feed­back as to the fol­low­ing items:

Would stu­dents want/use a com­puter lab on the Sixth Floor?

What soft­ware appli­ca­tions should be con­sid­ered for installation?

What nature of resources would be used/needed?

What time frame would be best for use as a com­puter lab? (morn­ings vs. after­noons vs. evenings; week­ends, etc)

Please send an email with your feed­back at: it@​gc.​cuny.​edu

Upgrad­ing Software

Other new devel­op­ments that stu­dents will notice this month are updates of sev­eral soft­ware pro­grams in use by local and pub­lic access com­put­ers through­out the Grad­u­ate Cen­ter. SPSS ver­sion 15.0 was recently acquired by the GC and should be up and run­ning by the start of Feb­ru­ary, accord­ing to Mon­tilla. As of late Jan­u­ary, SPSS is avail­able for stu­dent use from home via Cit­rix. The main improve­ments on ver­sion 15.0 are enhance­ments to the program’s data man­age­ment, visu­al­iza­tion, report­ing, and sta­tis­ti­cal applications.

Another updated pro­gram avail­able through Cit­rix is End Note X.

Round­ing out the recent soft­ware updates are ESRI ArcView 9.2, and ArcGIS 9.2. “Copies of ESRI ArcView 9.2 are now avail­able to CUNY stu­dents tak­ing ESRI related courses for a one-year period,” said Mon­tilla. In order to obtain this soft­ware, stu­dents should be advised that their pro­fes­sors will need to request ESRI ArcView 9.2 on their behalf. This may be done online at www.esri.com/slpromo. As far as obtain­ing ArcGIS 9.2, stu­dents should con­tact the IT depart­ment directly for instal­la­tion information.

Lastly, Maple, a math and engi­neer­ing soft­ware, will soon be avail­able for stu­dent and fac­ulty home use, accord­ing to James Hag­gard, Deputy CIO for Strate­gic Ini­tia­tives. By mid-February, stu­dents and fac­ulty will be able to down­load Maple through the CUNY portal’s E-Mall soft­ware cen­ter (www.cuny.edu), where stu­dents already have free access to down­load Syman­tec AntiVirus 10.0.

Tele­con­fer­enc­ing and Toll Free Access Numbers

Over the semes­ter break the Grad­u­ate Cen­ter has imple­mented a Tele­con­fer­enc­ing Bridge, which now allows callers to par­tic­i­pate in a sched­uled tele­con­fer­ence call, free of charge, any­where in the United States. Up to eight par­tic­i­pants, both inter­nal and exter­nal, will be eli­gi­ble to par­tic­i­pate in each indi­vid­ual con­fer­ence call. The catch? Although this ser­vice is open to stu­dents, reser­va­tions are required and are sub­ject to avail­abil­ity. In order to make a reser­va­tion, please call Jack Tra­longo in the IT depart­ment at least 48 hours in advance of when you would like to sched­ule a con­fer­ence call at (212) 817‑7340. Instruc­tions on how to use the Tele­con­fer­ence Bridge will be given at the time of reservation.

Another new ser­vice made avail­able since Decem­ber is toll free phone num­bers to call into the Grad­u­ate Cen­ter. There are two main toll free num­bers now running:

1 (877) 4-CUNY-GC (1 – 877-428‑6942), which dials directly into the Grad­u­ate Center’s main phone line. Callers may dial “0” to speak with the GC oper­a­tor dur­ing the hours of 9am-5pm on weekdays.

1 (877) 846‑9777, which allows callers to access the Grad­u­ate Cen­ter voice­mail sys­tem to check voice­mail from any­where in the U.S.

One last toll free num­ber that was acti­vated in Decem­ber is the one for access­ing the Tele­con­fer­ence Bridge, (888) 228‑4950.

Tech­nol­ogy that Works: Putting Track-It! To Work

The days of plac­ing a call to the Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy Help Desk (ext-7300) to have some­one fix a technology-related prob­lem that you have encoun­tered are numbered.

The recent acqui­si­tion of the updated ver­sion of Track-It! 7.0 will make life eas­ier for all within the Grad­u­ate Cen­ter. Track-It! is the pro­gram used by the Help Desk to track all work order tick­ets opened (and closed) within the build­ing. Some of the main fea­tures in ver­sion 7.0 include an auto­mated noti­fi­ca­tion appli­ca­tion, which will notify users via their GC email when their work tick­ets are opened and closed, a self-service fea­ture, which will allow users to open, edit, and close work tick­ets online, and a solu­tions data­base, so that users may trouble-shoot online first, should they desire, before open­ing a work order through the Help Desk.

The new ver­sion of Track-It! should be in place dur­ing Feb­ru­ary and, aside from allow­ing for greater ease in user-maintenance of work orders, has an addi­tional advan­tage: it will free up the Help Desk tech­ni­cians. On aver­age dur­ing the semes­ter, Mon­tilla esti­mates that the Help Desk receives 25 – 30 calls per day, and some­times up to 30 walk-ins per day, all seek­ing sup­port for soft­ware, hard­ware, print­ers, copiers, etc.

With Track-It! 7.0’s increased auto­mated stream­lin­ing process, it is hoped that the time spent by the Help Desk open­ing, edit­ing, and clos­ing work tick­ets will be reduced, thus enabling the tech­ni­cians to spend more time address­ing the actual tech­no­log­i­cal prob­lem rather than fill­ing out paperwork.

Update From Fall 2006: GC Paper Consumption

Dur­ing the Fall, the GC Advo­cate reported on the alarm­ing increase in printer paper con­sump­tion at the Grad­u­ate Cen­ter, an ongo­ing trend over the past sev­eral semes­ters. As of Feb­ru­ary, there is a print man­age­ment project under­way, headed by Jack Tra­longo, to explore the dif­fer­ent ques­tions raised by and pos­si­ble solu­tions to the GC’s paper con­sump­tion problem.

This group is presently try­ing to define what are the para­me­ters involved with man­ag­ing the GC’s paper con­sump­tion, and what tech­nolo­gies are avail­able to solve this issue.

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Posted by Advocate Staff on Feb 15th, 2007 and filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response by filling following comment form or trackback to this entry from your site

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