Proyecto Biblioteca

Title V – Enhancing the Library Network Infrastructure to Improve the Speed of Access to Information.

Title V is a project funding under the U.S. Department of Education, Developing Hispanic-Serving Institution Program. The goal of the Activity I of this project is to improve the ease and speed of access to information needed by students, faculty and administrators through easy access to the Internet, Intranet, and databases on students, faculty, courses, personnel, student records and admissions.

The library of the MSC is housed in a five-floor central library building and provides services to the entire academic community facilitating information access to support the teaching and learning process, research and health promotion. Amongst the services it offers are: Online catalog using Horizon; database searching (Medline, CINAHL, MicroMedex, ProQuest); electronic bibliographic searching; individual and group study facilities; photocopy and printing facilities.

The present proposal is aligned with Objective 5.4 of the U.S. Department of Education Five-Year Strategic Plan, which specifically addresses the strengthening of HSIs through the promotion of Information Technology.

Goals

To meet the basic objective of using technology in the direct support of learning and in accordance with our Title V Project - Activity I, we propose the following improvements:

1. Provide an increase o two orders of magnitude in the bandwidth available in the library building.
2. Upgrade the vertical wiring from copper to optic fiber.
3. Replace the present 10 Mbps hubs with 100Mbps switches connected to existing gigabit equipment on the campus network.
4. Provide wireless access points in two areas that are accessible to the public around the clock (over 5000 square feet on floors 2 and 5 of the library building) so that students and faculty can access information resources using their own laptops at any time, even after 10pm when the library shuts down. These areas already are prepared for individual and group study activities.
5. Provide wireless cards on a loan basis to students for use in their laptop computers

Benefits

1. Make the library’s electronic information sources available around the clock to the academic community from the designated areas.
2. Increase the usage of existing information resources (MEDLINE, CINAHL, MICROMEDEX, IPA.
3. Increase the availability of access over InternetII to: ProQuest, EBSCOHost, MDConsult and others.
4. Allow access to existing CD-ROM databases like CCINFO and HAPI
5. Make possible the connection of additional workstations in all areas of the library building
6. Make possible the planning and implementation of additional services like video-conferencing, remote learning and imaging.

(Click here for the infrastructure diagrams)