Minutes of the first meeting of the Computer Services Committee
on Thursday, 18 September, 2003, 11:00 a.m.

Present: Stacy Brown, Frances Frame, Peter Greim, Keith Plemmons, Susan Simmons, Kirstin Steele, Rod Welch; Debbie Fisher.

0. Presently the committee has one non-voting member (Rod Welch (ITS); proxy: Debbie Fisher) and seven voting members: Nancy Bell-Hundemer (PSYC), Stacy Brown (CHEM), Frances Frame (ENGL), Peter Greim (MACS), Keith Plemmons (CIVL), Susan Simmons (BADM), and Kirstin Steele (LIBR). Mark Del Mastro (MLNG) and Donna Gibson (EDUC) have been appointed but are not available during the fall semester. I have asked the Faculty Council to have the Committee on Committees name two temporary replacements. Two more voting members, namely one ROTC faculty and one student, and the liaison for Financial Management have not yet been appointed. Therefore, 4 voting members constitute a quorum at this time (half of the voting membership).

1. Election of chair:
Peter Greim, by acclamation.

2. Report from ITS
LeTellier Hall Lab was upgraded (from .3 GHz to 2.4 GHz PCs), Grimsley Hall will be, this semester. 3 of 4 barracks labs upgraded. A/C in Bond Hall labs (maintained by Physical Plant) improved. ITS will focus on barracks lab improvement this semester.
Some Bond Hall labs have new carpets (old ones ruined by repair work), some have new printers. DEAS Hall has now a small lab with about 8 new PCs.
Lottery money (total of ¾ M$) is being used for the single greatest computer need on campus: classroom equipment (including multimedia classrooms). By the end of the term, more than half of all classrooms (not counting small seminar rooms), that is 56 of 100, will have computer projectors installed. Older projectors (3-5 years) are being replaced. Projects for this year are the Jenkins and Byrd Hall auditoriums. How can the multimedia rooms be improved?
One permanent position in multimedia services has been dedicated to faculty support.
CAS (class absence system) was created at the beginning of this school year. Suggestions for improvement of CAS or Pancho? The classlist utility was changed to include students without Citadel mail accounts; the records are now updated nightly (from the student-entered information in PAWS).
Installation of Deepfreeze (a security system that allows more flexibility in the daily use of the PC) has begun in the campus labs; will be completed this semester.
So far there have been no requests to facilitate streaming video, but ITS is willing to help. Bandwidth is a concern; it may have to be restricted to subnets.
The new PCs ordered from Gateway, model 4100 with monitor and software and 4-year warranty, come with MS Office installed, but without Access. If a student needs Access, arrangements may be possible to loan the software for a limited time.

3. Procedure for distribution of new PCs (for faculty):
A subcommittee (Brown, Plemmons, Steele) will collect and evaluate proposals for new faculty PCs and make a recommendation to the full committee. (After the meeting, the subcommittee elected Stacy Brown as its chair.) The PCs will be the same that The Citadel has recently bought from gateway; laptops in place of desktops are possible, but with less computing power for the same price.

4. Requiring PCs for cadets (tabled from last year):
The committee will take up the issue; it was tabled last year and charged a subcommittee (Fisher (for Welch), Frame, and Plemmons) with fact finding and a report to the full committee.

5. Plan for other committee activities 2003-2004:
The committee should help set goals for ITS. In which direction should academic computing develop?
ITS wants feedback from its clients about the labs (e.g., concerning the operating system and office suite) and about the multimedia rooms. The committee will set up a suggestion box. Hotline is one of the options. Debbie will check if one of the hotline form fields can be used to direct hotlines to the committee.

(end of minutes)