Thursday, July 19, 2007

  • Residence crunch eases
  • Archives: 50 years at your fingertips
  • The work goes on
  • Editor:
  • Chris Redmond
  • Communications and Public Affairs
  • bulletin@uwaterloo.ca

Bill Lennox, former engineering dean

“It was January 1958,” writes Bill Lennox, “when I joined the third stream of Waterloo students entering Waterloo College Associate Faculties.” He tells a little of his story in the spring issue of the UW Magazine: “For the first year or so we attended classes at Waterloo College (now Wilfrid Laurier). Our main buildings were two large portables in the parking lot of Willison Hall. The portables had no air conditioning and classes during the summer term were brutal. In drafting class it was difficult not to sweat on your drawings, and any sweat marks were unacceptable to the professor. These buildings were eventually moved to the Waterloo campus and served as the engineering machine shop, our materials lab and the cafeteria.” Lennox went on to do a doctorate at Lehigh University, joined UW as a professor of civil engineering, and served as dean of engineering 1982-1990.

Link of the day

Chinese Lantern Festival

When and where

Blood donor clinic at Student Life Centre today; additional clinic on Monday, July 30, 10 to 4; sign up at turnkey desk.

Research+Technology Park Charity Golf Tournament today, Conestoga Country Club, details online.

Food services farm market today, 9 a.m.- 1 p.m., Student Life Centre.

Surplus sale of UW furniture and property, today, 12:30 - 2 p.m., central stores, East Campus Hall.

International spouses group potluck lunch today, 12:45 p.m., Columbia Lake Village community centre. Details: lighthousenm@gmail.com.

Career Services workshop: Career Interest Assessment, today, 2-4 p.m., Tatham Centre room 1112. Details online.

Linda Howe, communications and public affairs, retirement reception honouring 38 years of UW service, Friday 3 to 4:30 p.m., Needles Hall third-floor patio, RSVP nheide@uwaterloo.ca.

Student Life 101 open house and seminars for new first-year students, Saturday, details online. Residence rooms available for visiting students and family members, single occupancy $35, reservations online.

Retail Services: Bookstore, UWShop, TechWorx in SCH and CampusTechshop in the SLC will open on Saturday, 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. Staff will be ready to answer visiting students’ questions. Information online.

FEDS Used Bookstore is open for Student Life 101 Saturday, 8:30 a.m. – 5 p.m., Student Life Centre lower level.

'Super pool party' hosted by Graduate Student Association at Moses Springer Arena, Saturday 6:30-8:30 p.m., advance registration at Graduate House bar.

Extended library hours for exam study time Sunday July 22 – August 15: Davis opens 24 hours except 2-8 a.m. Sundays; Dana Porter opens 8 a.m. – 2 a.m.

GSA Sports Team Party Tuesday, 6-9 p.m. at the Grad House.

Computational Methods in Finance conference hosted by Institute for Quantitative Finance and Insurance, July 26-27, details online.

Last day of classes for spring term Friday, July 27. Exams begin August 2. Civic Holiday August 6 (no exams, UW offices and most services closed).

Duke Ellington Orchestra, this year's only Canadian appearance, August 6, 3 p.m., Stratford Festival Theatre; tickets $54 and $49, with special rate of $35 for UW students, faculty and staff: call 519-273-1600.

One click away

'The Tool: 40 years old and still Ridgid'
UW CS researchers work on open source graphics program
Student's research on models' eating habits (Record)
'General Engineering 119 and the de-emphasis of upper-year mentorship'
Accounting prof quoted over classroom clickers
Executives split on the importance of which university
Petition against boycott of Israeli universities
Celebrity president returns to Ohio State

Residence crunch eases

“The residence overcommitment problem has been resolved,” says Chris Read, university housing officer. Online messages go out today to approximately 4,000 incoming first-year students who have been accepted into residence this fall, telling them exactly where they will be living in September.

UW guarantees that all first-year students who apply by the deadline will live in residence if they wish to. Earlier this year the housing and residences department found themselves committed to housing 600 more students than anticipated, the result of an unexpectedly large incoming class.

In a memo yesterday, Bud Walker, director of university business operations, notes: “There have been various decisions made regarding the 2007 overcommitment of residence spaces in relation to the first-year residence guarantee. The overcommitment of just over 600 UW residence spaces will be mitigated by a number of strategies.”

One stratagem was to reassign 242 spaces normally given to upper-year and grad students — for example, in Columbia Lake Village — to first-year students. These are “uncommitted” upper-year spaces, Walker says, meaning that grad students might have applied for them but had not yet been accepted.

“Upper-year students who have been accepted into residence will stay there,” Read says. “We will honour that commitment.”

Upper-year students who applied for one of the 242 reassigned places will still be accommodated, Walker says, “in part, in off-campus buildings where we have made arrangements for contiguous blocks of apartment units. The rest will be given assistance by the Off-Campus Housing Office in securing suitable accommodation in the local community.”

The second stratagem was the creation of 120 triples – rooms with three students instead of two — in Ron Eydt Village, at a lower cost than a double. Allocating 360 students to triples yielded another 120 new spaces.

Students had until early July to make their residence choices. Nearly 300 of them selected a triple as one of their top three or four choices, Read says; the other 60 expressed no preference.

Roughly 200 first-year students have not yet been assigned a room, but Read says they will be accommodated by September. “We called them all and told them that they will definitely have places to live on campus,” he says. Over the summer, as many as 200 incoming students normally withdraw from the university, or decide not to live in residence; housing managers are counting on this attrition to find most of the remaining spaces.

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Archives: 50 years at your fingertips

Jane Britton, ArchivesThe university’s 50th anniversary brought an extra buzz to UW’s quietly busy Archives. “We anticipated a lot of demand stemming from the 50th anniversary celebration,” says Jane Britton, UW’s special collections archivist (left). “And there was: but it didn’t come where and when we expected.”

Archives is where everything by and about the University of Waterloo is preserved. Located in the Doris Lewis Rare Book Room in Dana Porter Library, the collection now includes more than 10,000 photographic prints, negatives, and slides, more than 12,000 packages of UW Graphics negatives, and enough clippings, publications and ephemera to fill 340 feet of shelving. Another 2,200 linear feet of university records are stored in the Commissary building.

The 50th anniversary spurred activity across campus, Britton says. “Requests came from all over, and people were asking for things long before we were ready, possibly because the planning committees for the 50th started work so early.”

Some of the products of this activity include Ken McLaughlin’s book, Out of the Shadow of Orthodoxy, which drew heavily on archives and special collections for historical data and images; the athletics department’s book, 50 years of Battle, and photo gallery; and UW’s 50th anniversary website. Britton also chose the photos shown in the 50th anniversary launch loop. And many departments asked for images to add an anniversary flavour to their web banners or event invitations.

“We were also busy because this was the City of Waterloo’s 150th anniversary,” Britton says. Archives supplied many images for Waterloo Public Library’s online “Waterloo 150” feature – profiles of people prominent in the city’s history, including many with connections to UW.

A major project of the 40th anniversary in 1997 was a travelling display of photographic prints from Archives. In 2007, the display is digital — the 50th anniversary image bank. Its foundation was an image preservation project that Archives began early in 2006, with the goal of creating digital copies of all photos not taken by university photographers. These photos are more vulnerable than UW-source photos. Nearly 1,700 images were scanned, catalogued and assigned subject headings.

“We piggybacked the 50th anniversary image bank project on that,” Britton says. For the anniversary year, they obtained permission to add nearly 800 photos from the K-W Record Photographic Negative Collection.

“The Record covered events on campus extensively in the early years,” Britton says. “I think the most fun I’ve had in preparing for this anniversary was going through the K-W Record negatives and finding never-before-seen images of people and events on campus. I often had to do quite a bit of digging. Sometimes I would find an interesting image and then, in an effort to flesh out the caption satisfactorily, I would have to find out what the story was behind it.”

For example, negative 67-1452 was labelled only: University of Waterloo, torch bearer, Feb. 3, 1967. “What torch? From where? Why? The clippings files and the Record gave me the story. A dozen UW students ran in relays from Ottawa to Waterloo with a torch lit from the centennial flame at the Parliament Buildings. They took 57 ½ hours to run 309 miles. It was done in honour of the university’s 10th anniversary and was part of the university’s winter carnival.”

The image bank – nearly 2,500 images available to anyone with a UWdir username and password – is very popular. It’s easy to use: log on, enter a search term, and see what pops up. In 1997, by contrast, searching for a photo meant hours or days looking through boxes of prints.

Technology has also made it much easier to research the records, documents and other materials in Archives. In 1997, researchers had to work through binders of collection contents lists to locate the items they wanted. Often the quickest route was through the archivist’s memory.

“After the 40th,” Britton says, “we began to create a searchable database that shows researchers exactly where to look for the materials they want.” The project lasted eight years. Now, a researcher can enter a search term and almost instantly get a list of all relevant materials.

Of course, an archivist’s work is never done. When the 50th anniversary year is over, the tangible products – minutes of meetings, books, magazines, newspaper supplements, ads, posters, photos, decals, pins, even Frisbees – will flow to the Archives.

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The work goes on

The elevator in South Campus Hall will be out of service from Monday at 8 a.m. to Friday, August 17, at 5 p.m. The elevator is being upgraded. . . . More road work starting next Tuesday, at the entrance to the ECE parking lot: the watermain tie-in for the Psychology addition is going through. One lane of traffic will be open at all times, says the memo from Don Haffner, Plant Operations — but pedestrian traffic will be re-routed. Work is expected to take two days: “There may be some inconvenience and/or delays.”

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