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Newsletter 10, October 1995

Beckett Park Report

Work on building the new Learning Centre within the old Library and IT Suite has now begun. Changes to the facilities have occurred in both areas.

Library

Some stock has been relocated, and access routes have changed. Locations of stock and facilities are listed below; items marked § have changed location:

Ground Floor Book Issue and Return Enquiry Desk Quick-Reference Section Catalogue Terminals § 3 Photocopiers § Microform material § Microform/photocopy readers Photocopier card dispensers Staircase Access to Mezzanine Floor Only

Mezzanine Floor

• Law Stock
• § Abstracts, Indexes and Bibliographies
• § Photocopier
• Catalogue Terminals
• Study Carrels

South Corridor

• Current Journals

School Practice Area School Practice stock § CD-ROM facilities § Audio-Visual materials § Photocopier

West Corridor Area

• Audio-Visual playback machines
• Satellite-Viewing facilities

Access to All Other Facilities and Stock by West Staircase Only

First Floor

• § Daily Newspapers
• Bound Journals
• Main Book stock
• Teaching Rooms
• Study Space
• Small Study Rooms
• Photocopier

Noise — especially on the Mezzanine Floor area — is likely to be a problem over the next academic year. Readers will be kept updated on any changes and offered alternative study space whenever possible.

IT Suite

• The open-access machines from the West (“Open Access”) corridor will now be available in JG201b behind the Help Desk (what used to be an Archimedes lab). We are particularly pleased about this, as it looked at one stage as though we might lose this facility for the duration of the work.
• The CD-ROM server was moved to Calverley Street to prevent any problems with vibrations from the building work, but the service has remained available from Beckett Park labs over the summer. The server will be restored to Beckett Park some time this term; we will need to close the service for this, but the closure should be for no more than a weekend.
• From October, there will be two laboratories with access to the new, enhanced Oracle system. The old “Solbourne Room”, JG225b, will be open access, and JG227 will become the main bookable lab for Oracle teaching. See under “Changes to the Oracle Service” in “Services Update” for further details.
• A cluster of ten machines for access to the World-Wide Web will open in November in JG225d, next to the Computer Room, and be temporarily located here for the remainder of the academic year. For more information on this service, please refer to the “World-Wide Web” article elsewhere in this Newsletter.
• Students and staff should see an improvement in the performance of Windows-based software in the IT Suite as we have upgraded more than 30 machines to new Pentiums.