A listserv of campus lab managers is having a discussion about how to make a directory of computer labs on campus, and their services and authorized users, in a way that’s maintainable and easily shareable. This lines up with some of my IT Open House goals, and IT@Illinois, so to hit an audience larger than just the labmasters-l list, I’m reposting my reply here. If you have any feedback, or can help us move along those goals, please let me know.

Hi all,

I run an IT Open House in Siebel Center the first week of classes and
field a lot of incoming student questions. Some of them are Computer
Science specific, but many are campus-wide — reflecting that our
students/customers/users are not as territorial or pigeon-holed as our
unit IT organizations. (An observation that a more campus-wide,
IT@Illinois perspective really does service our users better — at least
the student ones.)

I’m all for having a centralized repository of facilities (and their
info) available to students. If I can help let me know. But the walled
garden of only certain users in certain labs really makes this
complicated, and fragmented. From a user perspective, I don’t care that
ACES or VetMed have computer labs if I cannot use them. (And that cuts
the other way too — CS has labs, csil.cs.uiuc.edu, that are
restricted just to CS students. It means we’re also burned the first
week of the semester as Banner and auth groups don’t get updated as
quickly as students want.)

We could do better as a community of labmasters to unite under one
framework (authentication, authorization, applications, documentation,
signage, printing, promotion, support, labsitting, etc.) than we do as
isolated labs. Even if we are organizationally different, if we
appeared to our students as a common-front, we would service them better
(and might even make the job easier for us).

… That’s not too much to ask, is it?

The bigger questions that comes up in the open house isn’t “where are
the labs?” but “where can I print?” It’s an exercise for an IT Pro to
find 1) all the public labs on campus and their websites, 2) then their
printing information, charges and instructions. No wonder it confuses
our students so much. The best I could come up with to document and
share was: www-dave.cs.uiuc.edu/OH08-printing.pdf I would be
glad to replace that with something better (and share that with others).

How do we start to do that?

Dave

PS. You can see my Spring CCSP poster about the IT Open House at
www-dave.cs.uiuc.edu/CCSP-2009-ITOpenHouse.pdf