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Hamilton College




January 2011

In this Newsletter:

From the Editor

PaperCut – Spring 2011

HillConnect Accounts to be Upgraded

IT Collaboration through the New York Six Liberal Arts Consortium (NYSLAC)

Retiring Old AV Equipment

New Video/Audio Recording Permission Forms

ITS Working on Website Redesign

SiteManager Class Schedule

Events Calendar Reminders

ITS Newsletter Archives
 

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From the Editor- Maureen Scoones

Welcome back and Happy New Year! This semester our print management system, PaperCut, will be fully operational, details are below. This newsletter also contains information about other services ITS will be updating, including our website. Best wishes for a great semester!

 

PaperCut – Spring 2011 - Dave Smallen

After a successful pilot of the print management system during the fall semester, PaperCut will be fully operational starting January 17th. Quotas are as follows (and are restarted each semester):

  • Seniors - $70
  • Juniors - $65
  • Sophomores - $45
  • First years - $30

Charges for printing remain as follows:

  • Black and white printing will cost .05 for single-sided printing
  • Black and white printing will cost .07 for two-sided duplex printing (a discount of 30%)
  • Color printing will cost .15/side.

Student organizations that have access to printing will have their quotas set at $25. Requests for additions to student organization quotas are made to David Eng in the Student Activities Office. Students who work for faculty and have substantial printing as part of their jobs will have their quotas adjusted based upon requests from their faculty supervisors. These students will be notified when the adjustments have been made.

Any students with special needs should contact Dave Smallen (dsmallen) for adjustments to their quotas.

Top-up cards can be purchased at the circulation desk of the Burke Library in increments of $5. We are investigating the possibility of selling these cards through the campus vending machines.

PaperCut lets you view the history of things you printed and displays various details about the printouts. Your print usage is summarized in graphical form with approximations of environmental impact. Any questions about how to access your PaperCut account, see your balance, or add money to your quota can be answered by the ITS Lab Consultants, located on the first floor of the Burke Library.

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HillConnect Accounts to be Upgraded - Maureen Scoones

Late last fall, Google announced that it was going to transition its Google Apps for Education customer accounts to more closely resemble its consumer accounts. As part of this transition, if you currently use your Hamilton e-mail account to login to a consumer Google account (e.g. Picasa, Blogger, Reader, etc.), you'll need to use a different e-mail account to access your consumer Google account. Details about this upgrade and specific instructions you'll need to follow will be e-mailed to the campus community in the coming weeks.

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IT Collaboration through the New York Six Liberal Arts Consortium (NYSLAC) - Dave Smallen

Two years ago Hamilton, Colgate, St. Lawrence, Hobart & William Smith, Skidmore, and Union formed a consortium to explore ways in which the colleges might collaborate to reduce costs, share expertise, and improve services. Recently the consortium received a three-year, $300,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support this work.

One major component of the grant is the NY6 Mediashare project, a collaboration of the libraries and IT organizations, to find ways to efficiently manage, share and stream video resources among the six institutions. Each institution has a video collection of VHS tapes, DVDs, and other formats. For example, there are roughly 30,000 VHS tapes in the consortium, without significant overlap among the collections. These are mostly educational materials (as opposed to Hollywood movies) and VHS players are no longer being manufactured. Can we find a collective and efficient way to provide access to these materials for faculty and students?

One possible vision is one in which all materials are digitized and access to them is through a web interface. That is, a person needing to access a video would go to a web page, authenticate him/herself as a member of the consortium and choose the video s/he wants to view. The video would start playing (stream) to the computer. There are many complexities to this project, including compliance with copyright, licensing costs, and achieving quality in the showing of the videos.

In addition to Mediashare, the IT organizations are exploring other ways in which they can collaborate. The six institutions have already shared their approaches to managing Internet bandwidth, are jointly evaluating services to do security assessments of their network environments, and are exploring common purchasing of computer equipment. It is conceivable that in the future NYSLAC institutions could share IT services.

The central question for the consortium is: Can six institutions in upstate NY, do some things better together than they can do them separately?

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Retiring Old AV Equipment - Tim Hicks

Overhead transparency projectors
Starting this spring, overhead transparency projectors will be removed from all rooms equipped with document cameras. The document camera can project not only transparencies, but photographs, books, and 3D objects. Any faculty member still wanting to use an overhead transparency projector can request one.

35mm slide projectors
Several rooms on campus still have 35mm slide projectors installed in cubbies, projection booths or rolling stands. These will also be removed. A faculty member still using slides can request that a projector be given to him/her, or request assistance in learning how to transfer those slides to data images to be projected.

16mm films
ITS will continue to support 16mm films on a limited basis. The KJ auditorium has dual 16mm projectors and the Science auditorium has a single projector. We also have two working portable 16mm projectors.

Laser disc players, multi standard VHS players and audio cassette tape players
Other media formats that will require special requests are laser disc players, multi standard VHS players and audio cassette tape players.

Formats ITS can no longer support include 3/4 U-Matic video tapes, Beta video tapes, Hi-8 & 8mm video tapes, Reel-to-Reel audio tapes and Audio-Mini Disc players. If you would like to request an overhead transparency or slide projector please call Tim Hicks (thicks) at X 4790.

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New Video/Audio Recording Permission Forms - Marilyn Huntley

The forms used by ITS to acquire permission to record guest speakers as well as recording class presentations have been updated.  Please discard any unused blank forms.  The new forms are located on the ITS website (under Forms) and on the Events Calendar Request an Event form.

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ITS Working on Website Redesign - Mike Sprague

In October 2010, ITS began the planning process for a restructuring of the ITS website (http://www.hamilton.edu/information-technology-services).  You may have seen the community survey that was sent to gather general community feedback.  ITS also contracted with a research specialist to produce a detailed report on peer school IT sites, and has been discussing ideas related to search, site structure, and interactive support. 

To further aid our decision-making process, we are beginning a series of focus groups with various audiences on campus.  The focus groups are meant to get a deeper understanding of the needs of our site visitors, how they interact with the site, and how we can make our Web presence more useful.   We used a random selection process to select members of the faculty, students, and employees to invite to the sessions.  Focus group sessions will be held throughout the month of January.

In early February, the steering team for this project will evaluate the various reports and research, and plan for implementation of a completely new ITS website.

If you would like to send us feedback on this process, or ideas for our site redesign, you can fill out our feedback form.

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SiteManager Class Schedule - Maureen Scoones

Whether creating a page for your administrative office, academic department, student organization, or your own professional page, SiteManager, Hamilton's own web editing tool, can be used to create your web presence. Check out the upcoming SiteManager class and working session schedule.

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Events Calendar Reminders- Maureen Scoones

As we begin the third year of using the campus-wide Events Calendar, please keep the following in mind when reserving spaces:

  • If applicable, please note the setup time of an event on the event request form.
  • You can edit an event request submission until such time that it is confirmed.
    • When viewing the Events Calendar, click on the Pending link that appears on the left side of the Events Calendar screen.
  • Please do not resubmit approved event requests when you need to change the time, date, or location. Instead, please e-mail the scheduler the updated event details. You can locate the scheduler by clicking on Approved under the My Requests area on the Events Calendar.
  • Recently the All Events filter was renamed Events and Meetings.
  • If you have any questions about using the Events Calendar, please e-mail r25help@listserv.hamilton.edu.

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ITS Newsletter Archives

All past issues of the ITS Newsletter are available on our website.

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