Standard VI. Physical Resources and Facilities

VI.1 A program has access to physical resources and facilities that are sufficient to the accomplishment of its objectives.

The School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh is housed in its own building, featuring eight stories and three levels of underground parking. The building includes more than 50 offices for faculty, staff and students. In addition, there are currently seven classrooms, two student computing labs, dedicated research spaces for nine research groups, four conference/meeting rooms, and a student lounge on the main floor. The building is handicapped accessible with two entrance/exit ramps and two ADA-accessible restroom facilities.

In addition, the students have access to a University-wide initiative to create a barrier-free learning environment. This is supervised through the University’s Office of Disability Resources and Services. Students with documented disabilities may schedule weekly one-on-one meetings to identify potential barriers to success and to learn new strategies to reach academic goals. General topics include:  Executive Functioning Skills, Test Analysis, Note Taking, Active Reading, Utilizing Accommodations, Disability Counseling and Self-Advocacy. A subset of pertinent services and resources are made available to online students as well. For example, several hearing-impaired individuals received ASL interpretation via distance technology as part of their program of study.

In Fall 2012, the School began the renovation of two significant spaces to provide student/collaborative spaces on the third and eighth floors. The third floor space, formerly a traditional branch library, will have quiet study spaces, communal spaces designed to support collaborative work by Master’s and undergraduate students, and two conference/meeting spaces with an additional area flexible enough for multiple purposes such as seminars, poster sessions, speakers and community building events. The new student spaces will have ample electrical support, charging stations for devices, state-of-the-art projection screens, flat panel displays and technology assistance for applications such as Skype and WebEx conferencing. Many students and faculty work with colleagues from across the world: the conferencing facilities will permit efficient real-time interaction with researchers regardless of location. (See Appendix SCH 10 for schematic.) The space on the eighth floor will be transformed from an underutilized computer lab into team research space, with computer-enhanced labs, technologically facilitative collaborative space and teleconferencing centers for the iSchool’s doctoral students.

The IS building has seven classrooms, which have been updated with new technology to support the School’s teaching mission. The classrooms seat 306 students in total and offer projection systems and built-in computing and sound services. Classes with more than 75 students take place in numerous auditorium spaces within two blocks of the IS Building. Two spaces on the fifth floor have been upgraded in the past year to provide technology to support faculty and students, one with an 80 inch high-definition flat panel displays for lectures, research presentations, and related uses.

In the last five years, the University has updated both the wired and wireless network access throughout the building. Obviously, an iSchool needs extensive connectivity capabilities and access, and the new University-supported high-speed network provides state-of-the-art broadband capacity. Prior to this, the School developed, installed, and maintained its own networks – in fact, the iSchool created the first comprehensive wireless environment on campus. Having pioneered the development of both wired and wireless networking on the campus, the School is now the beneficiary of an institutional commitment to University-wide wireless and wired networks, with technical support provided centrally by the University. In addition, the electrical and air handling systems were upgraded on several floors to provide enhanced support for computing intensive work.

Classrooms in the Information Sciences Building

Room Number	Style	Capacity
Room 403	Lecture	75
Room 404	Lecture	50
Room 405	Lecture	56
Room 406	Lecture	43
Room 411	Lecture	32
Room 501	Lecture	50
Room 502	Conference	18
Room 522	Conference	20
Room 1A04	Conference	20
Room 831	Teaching Lab	20

The facility is not without its drawbacks. The building was designed by Pittsburgh architect Tasso Katsolas in 1965 in the Brutalist style. The building has been heavily renovated over the years, but the basic style makes structural change quite difficult. The core of the building, which houses elevators, restrooms, and stairways, does not permit opening up spaces to create sweeping research suites or communal areas. Although the University has undertaken repair of window seals and upgrading of HVAC systems, the building experiences the usual problems in temperature control found in structures that are more than 40 years old. In 2011, the Board of Visitors encouraged the School to begin petitioning the Provost to seek a new facility – indeed, the Board itself made such an appeal. Given the budget restrictions discussed in Standard Five, there seems little likelihood of acquiring a new facility. The Provost has indicated that consideration will be given to continued enhancements of the current building, rather than the acquisition of another building. The faculty and the SIS Council have been dedicating time during the Fall 2012 term to determine the types of upgrades to be proposed to the Provost. The underlying goals of any such renovations will be to provide more effective learning and research facilities for students and faculty.

The University of Pittsburgh

One of the benefits of being housed within a major university which serves more than 30,000 students is access to a remarkable array of amenities to support education, research and student life. The University of Pittsburgh has five campuses: Pittsburgh, Johnstown, Greensburg, Bradford, and Titusville. The School of information Sciences is located on the 132-acre Pittsburgh campus, which features an impressive array of amenities and educational facilities. The campus is in the Oakland neighborhood, which is home to residents, a thriving business district, and the campuses of Pitt, Carnegie Mellon University, Chatham University, and Carlow College.  The world-famous healthcare entity, UPMC, has its clinical and research facilities on the Pittsburgh campus.

There are 90 buildings on the Pittsburgh campus, the most famous of which is the 42-story Cathedral of Learning. Home to the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, the Cathedral also hosts Nationality Rooms which represent the cultures of the various ethnic groups that settled in the Allegheny County region. Each of these rooms features furnishings and finishes reflective of the home country’s classrooms or public spaces.

There are seven recreational facilities across campus to meet the physical fitness needs of faculty, staff and students. The Trees Hall facility has an Olympic pool with diving platforms, while Bellefield Hall has a lap pool. The Petersen Events Center has the state-of-the-art Baierl Recreation Center, as well as a 12,500-seat arena for Panthers basketball programs, concerts, and major campus events such as commencement.

The Pittsburgh campus provides a vibrant social life for students with concerts at Bellefield Hall or the Petersen Events Center, theatre productions at the Stephen Foster Memorial Theatre, and more than 450 student organizations. Pitt Arts, a university portal to the city’s vibrant arts landscape, provides free or reduced admission to a myriad of cultural sites and performing arts venues throughout the city.

Computing at Pitt

The university has eight major computing labs for students, hundreds of e-mail kiosks across campus, and numerous self-service print stations. The University of Pittsburgh's robust network and Web services support learning, teaching, research, collaboration, and business operations. PittNet is a high-speed, multi-service network that provides access to University computing resources and the Internet. The secure and easy-to-use Wireless PittNet service is available campus-wide and Guest Wireless accounts provides access to visitors on official University business. The Network Operations Center (NOC) manages University business and academic systems.

The University’s Computing Services and Systems Development (CSSD) group connects Pitt's researchers and educators to Internet2 and its member communities through the Pittsburgh GigaPop. The Three Rivers Optical Exchange (3Rox) is a regional network aggregation point, providing high speed network access to research and commodity networks.
 
Students, staff and faculty can easily and securely access valuable information at other institutions using their primary University Computing Account username and password. This is made possible by the University's membership in the InCommon Federation and Shibboleth (a behind-the-scenes authentication and authorization mechanism). Anyone at Pitt can currently access resources from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and EDUCAUSE. In addition, the University is now a member of Eduroam, a secure global service that enables students, faculty and staff to obtain wireless access to the Internet at more than 2,000 education and research institutions around the world, by simply entering their Pitt username and password.
 
CSSD connects Pitt's researchers and educators to the National Lambda Rail (NLR). The Network for Advanced Research and Innovation founded by the U.S. research and education community is the high-performance, 12,000-mile innovation platform for a wide range of academic disciplines and public-private partnerships.

Adjacent to the Pittsburgh campus, a mere block from the iSchool, stands the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). The PSC provides university, government, and industrial researchers with access to several of the most powerful systems for high-performance computing, communications and data-handling available to scientists and engineers nationwide for unclassified research. PSC advances the state-of-the-art in high-performance computing, communications and informatics and offers a flexible environment for solving the largest and most challenging problems in computational science. The University of Pittsburgh is a partner in this Center devoted to extending the NSF’s cyberinfrastructure program through the creation of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), the successor to TeraGrid.

Both online and on-campus students have access to appropriate computing resources, including a 24/7 Help Desk, at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition, the University provides a suite of tools for use on mobile devices including a special portal, text message updates, and schedules for computing facilities. These services and tools can be explored at this Web page.

The University Library System

Faculty and students at the iSchool have access to the world-class resources of the University Library System (ULS), which is the 26th largest academic research library in North America. ULS collections exceeded 6.3 million volumes, 5.5 million pieces of microforms, and 130,000 current serials in FY 2011. The central facility, Hillman Library, has seating for 1,700 users, reference services, and collections in the humanities and social sciences. The Archives Service Center, which holds manuscript and record collections documenting the history of Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, is located approximately three miles from the campus and is serviced by a shuttle bus that runs throughout the day.

Faculty and students can access the ULS holdings and licensed resources through PittCat+, the state-of-the-art webscale discovery system that combines online access to the library catalog and institutional repository with article-level searching and retrieval of journals, conference proceedings, newspapers and other media. The ULS collections include an extensive array of online journals, licensed e-books and other digital texts, in addition to general and subject-specific databases supporting the University’s research mission. ULS is also an innovator in the field of collection digitization and digital scholarship, managing D-Scholarship, a repository for the research output of the University, and hosting or publishing more than 20 peer-reviewed academic journals.

The University of Pittsburgh is a member of the Association of Research Libraries. Through membership in several library consortia, including PALCI, ARL and NERL, reciprocal borrowing arrangements have been developed with many other institutions in Pittsburgh and throughout Pennsylvania.

Both online and on-campus students have access to the University Library Systems’ holdings and services.