Student Scanners in the Library

Almost since the first day I started here at UNF, I have heard students ask our librarians about scanners. Two years later I finally pulled the trigger and bought a couple. On the second floor, next to the Reference Commons, we have a fairly standard 8.5"X11" flatbead HP scanner connected to an iMac. It is on the network and automatically maps to the H drive when students log in with their n-number. It already seems to be getting heavy use and Sarah has spoken with me about training so expect to see some meeting invites soon.

On the third floor, I've added a large format Epson scanner which will scan ledger size (11"X17") documents. It too is connected to an iMac on the network and resides in Paul's fish bowl in front of the big microform scanners. Hopefully this will be a benefit to the students and Faculty alike.

While both scanners connect to the network and map the student drive, they do not automatically map any other drive. There is a simple, though not intuitive, method of mapping other drives. If you wish to save files to the network simply follow these instructions:

First, click on the desktop, then  click on the menu item "Go" and select "Connect to Server". A box will appear will where you need to type  smb://oak/library$/ to get to the library drive or smb://oak/Users/N-number/ if you want to get to your private network drive. In the case of that last one, type your actual N-number. This will create an icon on your desktop for the respective drive. Give it a try.

Updating the Library Computers

Our first major technology orders of the year arrived yesterday. It was the largest memory order I have ever seen. 264 sticks of memory totaling 528 GB of RAM are now ready to go into our students computers. Nick and I spent most of the afternoon yesterday upgrading the student laptops from 1GB of RAM to 3GB. We did some preliminary testing a while back and discovered that boot times could be reduced dramatically with the addition of more RAM. On an interesting side note, all twenty of the currently active laptops were checked out yesterday afternoon with students waiting for more as we made them available. I would say that 25-30 were checked out at once late Thursday. So it took a while for the laptops to catch on but they now appear to be very popular. I suspect that all forty will be in use quite often next semester.

Aside from doing memory upgrades to the laptops, we will add more RAM to all of the student computers in the West Commons, Reference, and Periodicals. We will also bring most of the computers in 2102A&B up to 3GB as well. Some of you may be wondering why we are jumping all the way to 3GB. To put it simply, the price difference between a single 1GB module and a 2GB module was so small that we felt it was worth the little extra money. For example, it was only about $10 more per laptop to go to 3GB vs. 2GB.

Next week, Nick and I are going to perform some more tests to show the impact the extra memory has on boot and log-in times. I'll post them here for those interested.

Laptop Checkout at UNF 1.0

Over the summer we purchased 40 laptops to check out to students. We installed Vista on the laptops and the performance has been a little disappointing (read:slow). Recently we decided to see what a memory upgrade would do for them. We pulled the memory from half of the computers and added it to the other half to bring the total to 2GB. The results were very positive especially in the realm of boot times where we shaved a full minute off the start-up times. We've left one half upgraded and the other half awaiting new RAM but demand for laptops is up and nearly all of the 20 working laptops are being checked out. Fortunately our FCLA money has come in early and I hope to get the rest of the computers working within a couple of weeks. When it is all said and done, we will have 3GB of RAM in each laptop. I'll

One side effect of the slowly growing popularity is the demand on the wireless network. During one of my recent walk-throughs I counted over 100 laptops in use by students and almost none of them belonged to the library. Fortunately ITS is currently beefing up our wireless network by adding six additional access points. This should enable us to handle of demands of all of our laptop using patrons for quite a while.

In addition to memory upgrades and added access points, we're going to go back and take a look at the image on these laptops and see if we can tweak anything to improve overall performance. This should happen during the break in December.