Library unveils Resource Center

Students in the library can rest assured that the high-pitched whine of construction drills from the ground floor will no longer interrupt their studies. The construction is complete and a brand new Student Resource Center is slated to open for business on Monday.

Construction crews have transformed an old library storage room bordered by a row of vending machines into a sleek, open space dressed up with a postmodern flair. This new facility will be a one-stop shop for a variety of academic needs meant to supplement the services already provided in the Library West Commons.

“We are here to provide any assistance needed that enhances or assists the educational experience of students at Georgia Tech,” said Linda Cabot, the director of Information Technology Services at the Office of Information Technology, who helped oversee the implementation of the Resource Center.

While Tech waits for the Board of Regents to approve funding for the Undergraduate Learning Center (ULC), Cabot hopes that the Resource Center will give students a taste of some of the ULC services right now. Those services include advising, tutoring, tech support and printing, among others. Here’s the complete rundown:

Tech Support

All walk-in tech support will move from the Rich Building to the Resource Center. This includes hardware, software and wireless support as well as support for problems related to student accounts and printing quotas. Specialists will attend four specially designated workstations during all hours of the center’s operations.

“Pretty much anything that the students [received] from going either in person to or calling the support center…is all going to be available here,” Cabot said.

The Resource Center will also be a dense wireless hub, so students can access the internet via the LAWN from anywhere on this floor.

Demo Center

The Demo Center is a miniaturized version of the computer store displays at the Barnes and Noble in Tech Square. Tech is cooperating with Dell and Apple to exhibit the latest technologies from those two vendors in the front of the Resource Center, giving students and faculty the opportunity to examine these releases hands-on.

“If a faculty member is looking for the latest laptop, [they can] see what it looks like, pick it up, feel what the heaviness is [and see] the resolution of the screen they’re in,” Cabot said.

Cabot stressed that this is not a research and development station or a sales pitch, as the Resource Center will not sell the equipment. The intention is to give the Tech community a more intimate feel for the technologies available to them in the open market.

“[They] can come and take a look at the latest release as far as the hardware goes,” she said. “Will it meet their particular needs as far as whatever it is that they want? ....When you go shopping for something, you’re looking for a particular functionality in decent hardware, so those are going to be up here.”

In the near future, vendors may also offer demonstrations and seminars in the Resource Center regarding their products.

1-to-1 Tutoring

The 1-to-1 Tutoring program will operate out of the Resource Center from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. every Monday through Thursday and on Sundays as well in the fall. Special desks for tutors near the back of the Center are outfitted with swinging dry erase boards and spaces for books and laptops.

Students will be able to schedule appointments with tutors ahead of time by visiting the Success Programs website.

Undergraduate Advising

The Resource Center will have full-time undergraduate advisors on duty until 9:00 pm, with the possibility of later hours based on demand. Unlike departmental academic advisors, these advisors will not be major-specific but will focus on the general needs of undergraduate students.

“Our intention is to bring to the students not only advising from the perspective of ‘What courses do I need to take?’ but also generic approaches of ‘Well, I’m not sure I really want to be in this major, but I don’t know what my options are,’” Cabot said. “[We help with] those types of [career] decisions.”

The advisors will be a mix of existing staff and new hires and will also encompass advisement for pre-med, pre-law and pre-education students.

Conference Room

One feature that will still be under construction on opening day is a small conference room on one side of the center.

This will be an open-use room with approximately a dozen seats, a fold-away conference table, a dry erase board and the technology for conference calls. The room could be used for student group project meetings or small seminars.

“It’s a small facility, but it’s available if a group needs to get together and they’re from both sides of campus,” Cabot said.

Printing

Starting on Monday, all print jobs sent to Central PS will be delivered to a collection of bins immediately adjacent to the Resource Center. These bins will sit opposite a small shelf that students can use for sorting and organizing. Most importantly, the center will sort all print jobs according to students’ last initial instead of assigning them a bin number based on their Spectrum ID.

“Students who are coming through the library [can pick up print-outs], or, if they’re upstairs working and they sent something to Central PS, they’ll be able to do their pick-ups here,” Cabot said.

Cabot also said that the Resource Center is not attempting to compete with the Student Center when offering services such as the conference room. The focus of the Resource Center, she said, is to provide students with more easily accessible academic services.

“[The Student Center is] where people go for socialization, and that’s where some of the student organizations meet and have space already, so we don’t want to replicate that,” she said. “Ours really has somewhat of an academic focus in that we want to support activities and assignments that come out of the academic curriculum.”

The center is very spacious, with most of the features and services encompassed in one large room with an open wall looking out into the hallway. The workstation dividers operate on a Resolve system, which means, among other things, that the staff can adjust the opacity of the dividers by adding to or switching out the screens that comprise them. Also, the center is filled with colorful couches and chairs in sleek designs that complement the darker tones of the black and gray walls and ceiling.

Cabot said there were also plans to decorate the walls and outer hallways with examples of student artwork similar to those currently on display in the Multimedia Center.

Cabot said this new style as well as the services offered are very experimental and may change according to the recommendations of the students and staff. “Is it important to be able to have individual spaces? Is it important to have eye contact? Is it important to be able—when you’re in 1 on 1 tutoring…or advising—to have some more sound absorption?” she said. “Some of it is experimental from a programmatic standpoint, and some of it is experimental from a furniture standpoint.”

The Center has operated on student input since its inception. The Library and Partners Student Advisory Council—a core of eight to 10 students who advise the library’s administration—helped determine all aspects of the Resource Center from the services to the furnishings.

The council examined feedback from the Library West Commons and discovered that students enjoyed having many common services all centralized in one neutral location.

“What we have is a really unique opportunity to gather information and find out what does work and what doesn’t work so that we can make some adjustments,” Cabot said. “It makes sense to me. I’ve been here for a long time, and I just think that it’s... common sense. Why not bring it to where the students are?”

Resource Center Websites

Please visit the following websites for more information about the services offered at the Student Resource Center.

• Information about the tech support and printing service: www.oit.gatech.edu
• Sign up for a 1-to-1 tutor: www.successprograms.gatech.edu/
  tutoring/signup.html or call 404-385-7488
• View the advising schedule: www.advising.gatech.edu or call 404-385-7488

Also, please contact Linda Cabot at linda.cabot@oit.gatech.edu with any questions, concerns, or feedback about the Resource Center.