Volume 4. No 5
Information Technology News of the University of California, Davis February 1996
Information Technology News of the University of California, Davis February 1996
As part of the campus Technology Support Program, Lee also serves as the I.T. contact for the National Institute for Global Information change, providing 100 percent technical support for the NIGIC national and regional offices located at UCD, as well as all six NIGIC centers around the country. Says Lee, "I function as their Swiss army knife support person." In that capacity he is automating NIGIC's internal and financial data and coordinating network installation to bring together all of the group's e-mail, internal databases, and WWW information.
Soon he will be also working with the Center for Biosystematics to bring up a Unix system that will function as a WWW and database server.
For more information about DCAS projects and staff, see the WWW at:
http://www.ucdavis.edu/IT/DCAS/
Casey and Sarason produced the three-part film series for use in international agricultural development courses. Former agricultural engineering graduate student Eve Iverson, a student of professor William J. Chancellor, was the writer and associate producer for the project. Ray Lucas of CCS and graphic artist Karen English-Loeb also contributed to the production. The program illustrates how using draft animals for agriculture in emerging nations can transform subsistence farming into agricultural surplus. The film series has already won numerous smaller awards and is popular with 4-H clubs and other farming organizations.
The Charleston festival attracted more than 1200 entries from 27 countries. The award qualifies the producers to enter the larger WorldFest-Houston Film Festival slated for April.
CAUSE is the association for managing and using information resources in higher education, and the ELITE award honors the lifetime achievements and international impact of leaders in higher education information resources. Presented at the CAUSE annual conference, the award carries with it a $5,000 contribution in the winner's name to the scholarship fund of her choosing - Students First at UC Davis.
Barone was recognized for her accomplishments in a career that has spanned two major universities (Syracuse and UC Davis) and several national organizations, including CAUSE, Educom, and the Coalition for Networked Information. Active in systemwide UC initiatives, Barone also is a member of the UC Committee on Intercampus Use of Networking and Information Technology for Academic Purposes.
Board members attended a presentation in the CAIT which included an online preview of the Eastman photo collection. John Skarstad of the Library and Gabriel Unda of I.T. Creative Communication Services showed the digitized versions of the photographs.
Bob Thornton of Plant Biology demonstrated some of the multimedia materials he has developed for classroom lectures. William Benware of Linguistics presented the courseware he has developed to help students with German pronunciation, and Larry Colemen of Physics told the board members about his efforts to publish a textbook on the World Wide Web.
Individuals interested in learning more about the work of the UC Davis New Media Center may subscribe to the nmc discussion list. To subscribe send e-mail to listproc@ucdavis.edu. Leave the subject line blank. In the body of the message type:
Subscribe nmc <your firstname> and <your lastname>.
Information also is available on the World Wide Web at http://lm.ucdavis.edu/NMC/
The business relationship between Accounting and Financial Services and I.T., differs from past system development efforts in that Accounting and Financial Services is directing the project while Information Technology is providing technical consulting, programming, database, and system administration services. Deborah Lauriano and Karen Munoz of I.T. Information Resources are responsible for coordination and delivery of these services.
Work on the UCDaFIS project began in August 1995, and the new system is expected to go online in July 1997. A basic hardware and software infrastructure is in place to support development efforts. This hardware layer uses a client-server architecture, which includes a multiprocessor Compaq Proliant Pentium NT server, two Hewlett Packard K200 unix servers, and Pentium workstations. The primary software infrastructure consists of a database engine (Oracle), and a client-server development tool that has a graphical user interface (Uniface). When the system moves into production, additional hardware, primarily Unix servers, will be acquired to accommodate full deployment.
Literally thousands of I.T. staff hours have been devoted to this project. The size, complexity, and critical nature of this application, coupled with the demands of campuswide implementation, require I.T. staff to enhance their technical skills and increase their knowledge on a continual basis. Information Technology believes the investment in education and training will reap benefits far beyond the bounds of UCDaFIS.