The School of Communication, Information and Library Studies (SCILS) has designated several areas for research use which may be used for focus groups and interviews, workgroup meetings, and graduate students. The school has an advanced technology infrastructure and three primary computing facilities. The infrastructure consists of a gigabit switched Ethernet environment, 20 Windows servers, four Linux Enterprise servers, one Solaris server, two SAN storage arrays with over 4TB of storage space, systemwide backup hardware, and a heterogeneous mixture of hardware and virtual servers fulfilling all of the curricular and research needs of the school. In addition, a number of servers are devoted to remote application delivery by providing and running Windows-based software remotely. The school has two high-definition and one standard definition video conferencing and recording facilities.
The computing facilities include three dual-purpose classrooms and laboratories. One facility can be used as a large classroom/computing laboratory or can be subdivided by a built-in sound suppressing partition to provide for two separate independent facilities. Each facility has a ceiling-mounted projection system controlled separately or used in tandem when the partition is open. There are 65 desktop systems and two mobile carts of 20 notebook systems available for teaching and research. When not in use by classes, many of these computers are available for use by individual students and for extended research projects. There are nine high-definition plasma displays in key teaching and research locations throughout the SCILS facilities. Each high-definition plasma display has a SmartBoard overlay installed and can be used with a mobile whiteboard that can be attached to any plasma or LCD projector. These SmartBoards enable interactive whiteboard functionality. The SmartBoards can be manipulated to control applications or write in digital ink. The interactive whiteboards utilize precision touch screen technology to ensure that image quality is preserved. The digital ink can be recorded and stored.
All SCILS classrooms are enhanced with the latest technologies to provide for an enhanced teaching environment. The rooms have permanently integrated desktop systems and presentation devices enabling instructors to demonstrate many of the technologies the students are expected to use.
The SCILS Office of Information Technology is overseen by the assistant dean and director of IT. The assistant dean oversees a staff of two full-time professionals, a system administrator and unit computing manager, and about 12 part-time employees. The staff are divided into teams specializing in help desk, web development, and server administration issues.
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