On the weekend of October 27, computer technician Sydney Lindsay installed 10 new flat-screen computer monitors in the Dr. Ira Lewy Media Center as part of a plan to increase the number of library computers from 15 to 30 by Christmas break.
Fifteen new computers are set to be installed. In addition, the 15 computers that are already in the library will be fitted with flat screen monitors.
“The 15 [computers] that we had were heavily used,” librarian Christopher Asch said. “Everybody had to double up. Thirty computers will have that much more capacity to be available to the students to do searching or printing.”
Although the librarians have been discussing installing additional computers for 2 years, Assistant Principal Technology Edward Wong only approached Principal Stanley Teitel about the proposal last spring.
Richard Chase, a professor at John Hopkins University, donated approximately $14,000 to Stuyvesant for the purchase of new computers during the 2005 holiday season. Chase became interested in Stuyvesant when he accompanied Asch, his friend, to several Stuyvesant theatre productions.
“I brought [Chase] down to see some shows and things, and also the library. He’s very interested in libraries and education,” Asch said. “He got to know the library through his visits and he comes to a lot of the other events in the library. He saw the need.”
Chase has previously donated books from his own library to Stuyvesant.
According to Wong, the money for the purchase of the remaining 15 computers was donated by the Alumni Association. “This isn’t costing the school anything,” he said.
When Lindsay installed the monitors in the library over the weekend, problems with the plan became apparent. “All of a sudden, we started to start on this project and then people were saying, ‘You know, maybe we shouldn’t do that,’” Wong said.
All of the new computers have been delivered to Stuyvesant, but not all of them have been installed because Teitel is not sure where they are going to be placed.
According to Wong, one of the major problems is the amount of room the new computers will take up in the library. “I didn’t know that they used that space to give [Advanced Placement] exams. So, if we put 15 more computers in there, there’s no space left,” he said.
Another concern is if there are 30 computers in the library, “librarians can’t possibly [watch] over who’s in there, who’s doing what,” Wong said.
“It becomes a security issue,” he said. “It becomes an overcrowded issue.”
Asch said overcrowding and noise levels may cause problems when the new computers are installed. “The computer area tends to be a place where people work together and so it does generate noise because they need to talk about whatever it is they’re doing,” he said.
The librarians and Wong have proposed several ways of solving these problems. To control noise, the librarians want to partition the computer area from the space where students study.
“It’s kind of like a smoking and a non-smoking section,” Asch said. “You can’t really keep the noise out of the quiet area. I mean we can try to segregate it, but at the moment, if somebody wants to quietly read, or whatever, that’s a little hard to do in the library.”
Wong proposed creating a Computer Library Center, a separate room just for computer use. “There’s no plan yet,” Wong said. “Hopefully, we’ll get a better answer by the end of the term.”
The Computer Library Center would be located in a classroom on the second floor that is rarely used for teaching. No specific room has been allocated.
“I am not tied to having [the computers in the library]. I would like to have some here, but it would be nice also to have a place, like a lab, where students could go so they could print,” Asch said. “The issue seems to be supervision and who is actually going to stay in the room while students are there.”
Problems caused by a virus that shut down the school library computers from October 15 to October 26 highlighted how important computers are to the student body.
“A lot of people like to e-mail [their work] to themselves and print it out in the school and there was nowhere in the school they could print it out,” senior Alex McKendry said. “Everyone had to get extensions. All the papers were late.”
“For like a week, we had no computers at all, so I couldn’t function,” senior Samantha Shokin said. “I was really mad at whoever it was that caused it because I couldn’t get any work done for a whole week.”
According to Asch, during a single period “[the computers] are almost all used and there’s usually a line.”
The network crashed because “somebody deliberately brought something in on a flash drive,” librarian De Lisa Brown said.
Librarians could not figure out which student brought in the virus. “Short of having people sign in and out every time they use the computer, you can’t really be sure who was on at that particular time,” Brown said. “I don’t really think that the students want to go in that direction.”
