Kettles and iMacs - how we respond to your comments

Joanne Casey highlights some of the changes and developments we've made in response to your feedback.

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Your comments and feedback - whether you pass them to us in writing, by email, in person or on social media - are a crucial element in our service development. Feedback is considered on receipt, and again by managers within Library, IT and Archives. We can't always act on your suggestions, but when we do, we like to let you know.

• Feedback

These recent developments have all been informed by your comments.

Book Delivery Service

This facility has been in place since Summer 2014, allowing staff and students based at King's Manor
to request items held at the main University Library for delivery to King's Manor, and vice versa.

This scheme was well-received from its implementation, but recently we were asked to further raise awareness of the service, especially amongst students at King's Manor. We've responded to this with posts on social media, information on the digital screens around campus, and information sent to the department to share with students.

We continue to receive positive feedback about the service:

• Fantastic service - many thanks.
• It's great! Fast & efficient and really useful.
• I love this service ... so easy, and the book turns up quickly, thank you!

Behaviour and space 

As ever in the approach to exams, the Library has been busy - much as we'd like to have a seat for every student, space and fire regulations don't allow for this.

However, we've done our best to make your life easier and to encourage best use of the space available in a number of ways:

• Our seating availability page shows where there is space in the Library - it's on the web, and also displayed on the digital screens.
• Seating availability
• We've worked with the University to provide and promote pop-up study spaces across campus - our blog post 'Taking your Library home' introduces the Library resources that you can access wherever you are.
• Taking your Library home
• We've encouraged use of our 'Text a problem' service so that we can take quick action where people aren't respecting the needs of other Library users - whether this means talking in the silent area, or reserving seats with bags, coats and books when they leave.
• We've received repeated reports of people leaving property here overnight to keep a place for the morning, so our overnight teams check the Library and note any apparently abandoned property - if it's still there at 9am when we start to get busy, it's removed to free up the space.

Find out more about how we believe we can work together to make the Library a happy and effective place for all - and please get in touch if you have any suggestions:

• Library behaviour

Hot water in the Library cafe

The kettle by Benjamin Lehman
Used under a Creative Commons licence

Over the years, lots of people have asked us to provide hot water in the Library, for drinking, for
making tea and coffee, and for adding to instant meals like noodles.

We've talked to Commercial Services, and agreed that we would provide a kettle next to the water cooler when the Library Cafe is closed overnight. Commercial Services are now also providing self-service flasks of hot water during the day.

Please remember to stick to the Library policies on food and drink:

• if you make yourself hot food like noodles, please only eat these in the cafe; 
• if you make hot drinks to take to your desk in the Library, always use a lidded mug.

No more printed receipts

We know it's important to many of you that we do as much as we can to protect the environment - over the years, we've introduced power-saving on PCs, provided recycling bins in the Library and IT rooms, and ensured that our printers are filled with paper approved by the Forestry Stewardship Council. Our latest change is to stop issuing printed receipts for standard loans and returns. You can still check due dates online and in the weekly account summary that we email to you.

"Glad to see that @UoYLibrary are doing away with paper receipts. Save the environment and all that jazz!"

Office 365

In the Autumn we announced that we had subscribed to Office 365 in order to provide students with a free copy of the Microsoft Office suite to install on their own PCs, laptops, tablets etc. Almost immediately, members of staff asked whether this could be made available to them too.

Although staff already have access to MS Office for University owned PCs and laptops through the Campus Agreement, it made sense to give them the opportunity to install it for free on their own devices, and on University owned tablets and smartphones, which aren't covered by the campus Agreement. Accordingly, Office 365 was rolled out to staff in May.

• Office 365

Wifi

We've had lots of comments from students in Constantine College and Halifax College who feel that the wifi service isn't meeting their expectations. Our Networking team have been carrying out some detailed investigations, and have changed the wifi setup in some areas to establish whether this improves the situation. Residents of these areas (Constantine blocks A and E, and Ainsty Court) have been asked to complete a short survey to help us find out whether to continue with the new setup - we hope to be able to report more in our next update.

iMac trial

iMac by Adam Maracz

Used under a Creative Commons licence

From time to time, both staff and students have asked why we don't provide a Mac service. In response to this, our Desktop and Printing Services team have investigated and discovered that this is now something we can feasibly offer. We're running a trial iMac service in the Fairhurst building over the summer, and will decide at the end of the trial whether this is something we should continue, or indeed expand.

• Macs-imising IT rooms

Macs-imising IT rooms

With a smattering of terrible puns, Adrian Young explains how we're going about providing iMacs for students.

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Delicious Apple by cheriejoyful
Used under a Creative Commons licence

Some months ago, a student asked why IT Services don't provide Apple Macs in our IT rooms?

Good question I thought, why don't we do this? Is it because the hardware is too expensive, or that the systems to provide the service aren't available or are equally expensive? I decided it was worth having a look into this further to see exactly what we could do.

Putting a managed Windows PC onto a desk is pretty easy for us - we've been doing it for many years and the systems we use to manage them are effective and powerful. To do the same for Macs needed thought and investigation. We couldn't use the same systems to manage the Macs as we do the Windows PCs as obviously they use different technology. We had already experienced this when developing the managed Linux desktop. The fundamentals are the same - it's still some hardware with an operating system and some applications - it's just that the hardware and the operating system are different.

Where to start?

iMac by Adam Maracz
Used under a Creative Commons licence

The first thing to look into was how much more would it cost to buy Apple hardware as opposed to the PCs we get from Stone. If it was far too expensive then this wasn't going anywhere, and we would use the budget to buy more PCs instead.

Well, it turned out that it wasn't too bad. Yes, the iMacs cost more but not horrendously so - especially with the educational discount we get from Apple. Mac minis were cheaper but the spec for the hardware was lower than we wanted. iMacs provided the necessary spec and are a neater solution - an all in one system, without separate monitors or keyboards.

So, the financial aspect was ok.

Next question was would we be able to provide a similar service to that of the managed Windows PCs? What systems did we need so that people could log in, get to their filestore, use applications, and print? A quick proof of concept seemed to say we already had available systems to do most of the things we wanted to do.

So, the technical aspect was ok.

The practicalities

Once we had established that this could be a viable option we needed to look at some of the practicalities of doing this.

First of all where would we put the iMacs? Somewhere in the Library seemed the logical solution, it's a popular study space and a good place to try out new services.

Ok, the Library looked promising, but would we use one of the existing IT rooms or find somewhere new? Space is an issue and taking out some of the existing PCs could be problematic. What about the Fairhurst? There's some space there that we could use, and this means that the iMacs are close to the IT Support Office if anything goes wrong.

So, the practical aspect was ok.

Next question. What software do we put on there? Well we already have quite a few applications installed on the Windows PCs that we could use, so MS Office, SPSS, Endnote. That would be a good start. What about the old cliche of using Macs for creative stuff? Should we look at the Adobe Creative Suite? As it's expensive and we don’t have much call for it academically, we decided that we could look at that later. We'd launch the service with a standard set of applications, and see what feedback we receive.

So, the software service aspect was ok.

Now we know what hardware we want, we know what systems we want to run it, we know where to put them, we know what we want on them. It sounds like we're pretty much there.

The trial iMac service

Pixel and her iMac by Mik Ayre
Used under a Creative Commons licence

The outcome of this is that we will be providing a small trial of iMacs on the 2nd floor of the Fairhurst building over the summer holidays. You'll be able to log in with your normal IT username and password, and you'll have access to your personal file store (H: drive): there'll be some familiar applications on there, and you'll be able to use York Print Plus.

We'll see how it goes and see if there is a sufficient demand to continue with this as a service. If budgets allow, maybe we'll expand it a little to other areas, especially for staff, and perhaps look at other software.

It's been an interesting journey to get to this point, there have been many discussions about the best way to do this, hopefully we will deliver a service that will be useful... we will certainly be pushing IT to the Macs.


UPDATE: The new Apple Macs were installed at the beginning of August 2015 on the second floor of the Fairhurst building (where the PC thin clients are). While we finalise the software suite for the Apple Mac service you can use the iMacs for browsing the web, printing and editing documents.

We need your feedback on the service, including suggestions for software and comments on your experience. Have you used the iMacs yet? If you have, please complete our survey here: bit.ly/imac-feedback