University of Glasgow blether thread

Hm?

I said I would be alone for freshers, and you quoted me saying lol

So i was asking if you would be too

I don't think much of the new website design at all. That static picture on the right of the screen is ******* annoying.

Oh, and I forgot to say, I am officially back in for second year politics.

Whilst I appreciate the new website looks slightly nicer, I prefer ones that can actually be used to find what you want quickly and easily.

What do people think of the library changes that are coming? People do not want 'group' study spaces, they want access to computers and they want desks where they can sit and read and take notes.

I like what they're doing with the library, but I think they should stop after this. Everyone brings a laptop to university, the need for desks to be filled with desktops so people can kill two hours on facebook between lectures is not necessary. If people have wifi they can sit somewhere else and do it, and not waste workspace with procrastinating. If they put plug points and wifi into the annexes, which should happen in the next few years, it might redress the balance. Whilst it's always good to listen to students- a lot of the time it's first and second years that respond to these surveys- and to be blunt, the work isn't hard enough yet for most of them to know how to study properly. I know a few who think sitting round having a chat all day is great if some work gets done in between, when they can't get any desks at the business end of their degree because all the first years in three years time love spending all day in the library chatting and on facebook, they'll soon bitch and moan like I'm doing now.

fortunately i don't have to suffer in the way you library users do as we have a lab in the boyd orr which is almost always empty.
apart from the month of march really, in which case the maths department books out both computer rooms for first years to do a useless pointless skills test (which i didn't need to do when i was in first year) and force all of the honours students doing projects and reports out.
then we just hop over to the kelvin building though which has about a million computers (and free printing shhhhhhhhhhhhh)

Aren't those protected so that only those in certain faculties/departments can use them? I usually camp out in my department rather than the library, but the printer is crap.

getting rid of desktops is a ludicrous idea though, of all of my friends in the department (and the physics department) only 1 regularly uses a laptop to do his work, when you only need to do one report at most a year, and when you DO need to do it you need specialised software to do it, there's no sense on wasting money on a laptop for uni. I don't know what I'd do without the desktops at Glasgow, even though in the library when i do go there (usually to escape my friends so that i can get some actual work done) the desktops are so ridiculously slow and painful to use, that only requires an update of the servers, not the actual machines.
Unless the university decides to go the route of adding £100 a year to tuition and supplying every new student with a laptop there is no reason to get rid of the desktops in the library

If they need specialist software to do work- fine. That should be the department's responsibility and provided for in the lab space. That's the case in dozens of departments. Having some desktops with a fuller range of software nearer to books in the library- also fine. But having half of every floor now full of them, when such a tiny percentage is actually used for study, is not what a library is for. There are about 50 computers in the Social Science Library in Oxford, 20 in the American studies library, and virtually none in the Law, College, History or Bodleian libraries. OUCS will provide you with software if you really need it with a renewable license key each year, otherwise it's installed on lab machines. Otherwise, they encourage people to bring their own laptops if they want to use them in the library. I don't see what advantage having 1000 PCs rather than 200 achieves in Glasgow's library, save for allowing an extra 800 people somewhere to waste time.

It means there's almost always a computer available (though you might have to look hard), in the few times I've been to the library to study I've never struggled to find a space to study, even in the middle of May when the place is rammed. If they reduced the number of computers then there would be even more space yes, but it's awfully helpful being able to go online to find something.
Reducing the number of computers wouldn't mean people will bring in their laptops to go on Facebook, people will come in, see there's no computers available and think "oh well". It just means that there will be even less available for the people that actually do need them.
Yes there are departmental labs, but for people who want access to the books in the library that isn't ideal.

They've bought the computers now, but the first step should be to restrict heavily what IP addresses they can visit. As someone who used the library every day around exam time for six weeks at a time for the last three years, I can say that desks were at a premium from 9.30 in the morning onwards- usually with the library itself being a third full but every desk having a notepad, one book and no one to be seen until they came back at 2pm for half an hour and then buggered off again.

Levels 2,3 & 4, fine- but it disadvantages the rest of us making the rest of the building anything other than a study space. Glasgow's library is a much nicer place to spend time than most of Oxford's dark and dusty 19th century rooms in the Bodleian, but they're in danger of making it too comfortable so that half of campus descends on it whether they have anything to do or not.