Open Access Computing Facilities
Summary of facilities available College-wide
Goldsmiths IT Services provides open access computing facilities for all registered staff, taught postgraduates, research postgraduates and undergraduates. It operates from a custom-built IT Services Centre. This incorporates a main open access area, four teaching rooms, an Assistive Technology Centre and a Help Desk. A special laboratory for research postgraduates is located in the Hatcham House Post-Graduate Centre (19, St. James).
Several Departments operate laboratory facilities for their own students. These include Anthropology (Macs & PCs), Art Education (Macs), Art History (Macs & PCs), Design (Macs & PCs), Education (PCs), Computing (PCs and Research Group Macs), Media & Communications (Macs), Psychology (PCs), & Visual Arts (Macs).
Some of these Departments provide technical support for specialist hardware provided by IT Services, but which is located in their own laboratory space.
Equipment includes slide scanning, colour printing and video editing systems. Please enquire at the IT Services Help Desk (7555) for further details.
IT Services Centre
Ground Floor
- ISC003 PC Teaching Lab. 12 HP PCs
- ISC004 Assistive Technology Centre, 8 HP PCs, 1 17" LCD iMac
First Floor
- ISC100 70 iMac and G4 systems including 21 x 20" Intel iMacs
- ISC101 Help Desk service, disk sales, registration queries
- ISC102 Main PC Teaching Lab. 31 HP PCs (Windows XP)
- ISC103 Macintosh Teaching Lab. 20 x 20" iMac G5/1.8GHz, 2 x 20" Intel iMacs
- ISC108 Small PC Teaching Lab. 18 HP PCs (Windows XP)
- ISC109 48 HP PCs (Windows XP)
- ISC/Warmington 1st Floor. IT Services Staff Offices
Second Floor
- ISC200 Language Resources Open Access. 16 Elonex Pentium systems
- Language Teaching Labs. 45 Elonex Pentium Multimedia Systems
- ISC/Warmington 2nd Floor. IT Services Manager and P.A./Executive Officer, Web Team, Systems and Documentation Officers
- Hatcham House, St. James, Post-Graduate Centre, 16 PCs, 3 Macintosh G4s
Whitehead Building
- W101 Central Unix and Windows servers. Supplies Centre. No IT Services laboratory
It is recommended that all students decide which computer system they prefer and stick with that throughout their course. This will avoid any possible difficulty of transferring files from one system to another, although facilities exist to permit the easy transfer of PC to Macintosh files and back on the Macintosh platform. All users must be registered with IT Services in order to obtain a username and password to access machines in the open access areas. Log-in/out is required on all Macintosh and PC systems.
IT Services have standardised on certain applications software on its systems. Word processing and general integration of text and graphics in documents is typically the main requirement.
On PCs, Microsoft Word XP, Microsoft Excel XP, Microsoft Powerpoint XP are available running under Windows XP. In addition, EndNote, Adobe Photoshop Elements, SPSS and NVivo are installed.
On the Macintosh OS-X machines, Office 2004 (Word 2004, Excel 2004 and PowerPoint 2004) is installed. AppleWorks 6.2.9 is also provided. This is an integrated application which handles most WP requirements as well as offering full integration of WP, graphics, database and spreadsheet in one document. A number of other media applications are available on the Macintosh including QuarkXpress 6.5 (ISC103 and some in ISC100), Illustrator, InDesign, PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, Freehand, Fireworks and Flash.
In addition, all Open-Access Lab systems run a number of Internet-related applications including Mulberry and squirrel Web-Mail for eMail (Macs and PCs), and Firefox and Internet Explorer (PCs) and Firefox and Safari* (Macs) for Web browsing.
* Please note that Internet Explorer in now no longer supported on Macs by either Apple or Microsoft and has been removed from Lab system setups in the Open Acces labs owing to a number of Web site compatability issues.