January 2010 Information Technology Committee Meeting

January ITC Meeting

The full meeting minutes are available here (at the moment, they’re still in draft format, so until mid-Feb please don’t quote from them)

Updates
- The MyWebSpace upgrade has happened. There was general agreement that the new interface for finding groups is pretty lame, hidden under the icon that’s supposed to be the Sun.
- The trickiest part of the cooling upgrade for the Computer Sciences building, which includes the DoIT machine room (ie, where www.wisc.edu, wiscmail, MyUW, Learn@UW, etc all live). The computers produce so much heat that they have to be air-conditioned 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and the building gets chilled water to drive the A/C. The equipment that handled it was past its rated lifetime, and we were in danger of maxing out the cooling, so we upgraded the pipes to bring in more water, with bigger pipes.

In order to do this, we had to shut down the current cooling system so the steamfitters could cut out the old pipes and switch to the new ones. To puthis off, we shut off as much of the computing resources as possible, taking advantage of an early January lull, and with a huge collection of fans and temporary ductwork, used the outside air to cool the building. We were helped by outside air temperatures of -3 below, but even then we just barely made it. (The lack of humidity was problematic, but we apparently pulled it off.) The pictures tell some of the tale:
http://can.doit.wisc.edu/~bradshaw/cooling/ - one of the hardest things was having to switch the person on guard duty at the doors frequently given the extreme cold and the wind from the fans.

- A quick update on the “Hacker Within” student org ( http://groups.google.com/group/hacker-within ) This is a student-led group, that teaches other students who are mostly (all?) not computer science students, but still need programming in order to get their work done. Computing is becoming critical to more and more disciplines, so it’s good to see things like this springing up.

Our main agenda items were up next. We started out with an update from the library on the Hathi Trust – hathitrust.org (It’s the Hindi word for ‘Elephant’). This is related to the Google Book Scanning agreement. The HathiTrust is a collaboration between the University of California System and the CIC (The Committee on Institutional Cooperation – basically, the academic version of the Big Ten, but still with the University of Chicago). The trust serves as an insurance policy with the Google book scanning deal – they’re keeping digital copies of everything that Google scans. For now, we’re trying to stick with things that are out of copyright or were always public domain, but as much as possible, we want to make electronic access available to all of our collection, on demand. The powerpoint from the meeting has some interesting stats and facts about the Google book deal

Next we got a demo of the new Courseguide system enrollment management is developing. This is something that we should ask to have demoed in a Shared Gov meeting, and to get them to talk about some of their future plans, because some of it is pretty cool. One thing that I thought was really cool was the hope to sort of pre-create some common course plans.
Eventually, the course guide is going to get live data on what seats are open, and what sections are full versus what sections just aren’t open, and more information about the instructor. Right now it’s pretty bland, but eventually the hope is to get real professor information, a syllabus, research the professor is involved with, and hopefully some actual lectures and information about the teaching style of that class, so you can pick what class might be the best fit for your learning style.

The last thing we looked at was a report from the “Deans Working Group on Information Technology and Library Infrastructure”, but it’s still an early draft, so I’ll wait until we see a later version before going into it.

Erik Paulson