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Aug. 18, 2008
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By
Joshua Preston
The design of the new 88,600-square-foot library was intentional, meant to inspire with its grand architecture and to become a lasting presence in the community, in the same vein as the Carnegie libraries built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Just as those libraries catered to book lovers and knowledge seekers of that age, so too is NGCSU's new library prepared to meet the needs of today's users in a new era of information exchange. "There are two libraries in this one place," Shawn Tonner, director of library services, said. "We have a brick-and-mortar library and an electronic library. Both are very dynamic and always expanding." The library will house the campus's largest computer lab, which will cater to students' needs by staying open for 16 hours daily, Monday through Thursday, with additional hours on Fridays and weekends. More than 200 public-access computers will populate the library, including 30 laptops that users can sign out and use around the building. All PC and Macintosh computers will be equipped with access to the Internet, the library's databases and more than 50,000 electronic books as well as specialized software for graphics and media editing. Books of the printed variety, totaling around 200,000 titles, will fill the second floor and be available to the university and Lumpkin County communities starting in mid-September when the entire collection is moved from the Stewart Library. During the first month of school students may requests books, which will be delivered to the Library Technology Center within 24 hours. But should passersby mistake the new campus landmark as merely a library, they need only enter at the ground level and witness the flurry of activity, interaction and energy that the staff anticipates will mark a new learning experience for students. "The new building works in ways that the old one simply couldn't," Tonner, a librarian of 30 years, said. "You have at your fingertips technology, library content, the scholarly atmosphere, staff expertise from IIT, the Writing Center, and the Center of Teaching and Learning Excellence." The library will bring under one roof several well-established campus resources. Information & Instructional Technology will house its Help Desk, client support and instructional technology offices in the library, providing campuswide support from an easily accessible location. The Center of Teaching and Learning Excellence or CTLE will focus on supporting faculty and students with research and experimental learning opportunities. Also relocating, the Student Writing Center will enjoy greater visibility in a prominent spot on the first floor. "Students will come here to use leading-edge technology, work with each other to develop multimedia projects, take distance learning classes and conduct research. The facility has new purposes and will be a new drawing force on campus," Tonner said. The library boasts 25 dedicated group-study rooms designed to allow students to work together on projects without distraction. "The library is an extension of the classroom," Tonner said. "Faculty can assign a project, and the library by its design and intent allows student groups to meet, learn and relate that learning back to what's going on in the classroom." While the computer-filled first floor promises to be an exciting and popular spot, the second floor will conform to a more traditional library environment. The top floor, with a sweeping new view of campus, will offer exhibit space, meeting rooms, and CTLE activities. "The library is the best place to study and the coolest place to be seen," Tonner said. "That type of thinking is associated with good libraries, ones that ultimately focus on users and their needs." Skeptics of the library's "cool" factor need only step inside. At the entrance, a storefront coffee bistro, a la Starbucks, will greet library users and be just one more reason that the Library Technology Center is likely to become a premier resource for students and others far beyond campus. "It's necessary to be dynamic in any environment to keep users coming back. Our aim is to create an atmosphere that students will come back to again and again," Tonner said.
The university's new parking deck has opened, and, combined with new parking areas along the road leading to the facility, the parking deck adds 613 parking spaces to the main campus. The parking deck is open to non-resident students during the day, but between 5:30 p.m. and 7:30 a.m., it is available free to all students and on a fee-basis to other members of the campus community, local residents and visitors. Seated on top of the parking deck, the new Recreation Center is expected to open later this fall. The 54,000-square-foot two-story facility will house the university's recreational sports programs and provide new fitness opportunities. Some of the highlights include a three-court gym, a climbing wall, a walking/running track, and multiple exercise areas.
By
Joshua Preston "I'm trying to go to medical school and be a surgeon, and I've always wanted to fly, so I'm going to commission in the Army and do both," the biology major said after muscling her way through an obstacle course during FROG Week.
The second week of August, designed as an orientation for new military students, tested the endurance of 240 new cadets, who graduated Sunday after the traditional 5K run up Crown Mountain. Joel Wettstone, 18, has traveled overseas most of his life with parents who work in reconstruction and has been to Afghanistan six times and lived in Uzbekistan. He expected the week to be an intense experience and absorbed every minute of it as he hurdled himself over walls, clung to wooden beams 30 feet off the ground and low-crawled his way through mud pits during five days of non-stop action. Developing a challenging test in FROG Week was a priority for this year's upperclassmen. The action was amped up to include an adrenaline-filled relay and water survival training. In the relay, cadets competed against each other to see who could flip tires the fastest, run with sandbags in record time, push a Humvee the farthest and endure through a host of other events. "I think it's about molding the freshmen into leaders really," Brittany Kall, the second battalion sergeant major, said. "The cadets are pushed to their limits to build their confidence and so that they'll pull together as a team."
In early July, North Georgia College & State University, like all state public institutions, submitted a plan to the Board of Regents that identified potential savings totaling five percent of its state-funded budget. For North Georgia, whose state appropriations for this year were $28.3 million, the five percent amounted to $1.4 million. Since then, in response to lower than expected state revenues, the state of Georgia has imposed an actual budget cut of six percent, or $1.7 million, and further cuts remain a possibility. President David Potter met with North Georgia faculty and staff this past week, as many faculty members returned to campus for fall semester, to communicate the status of the budget cuts and their impact on university operations. "We are an institution with limited resources, but growing momentum," Potter said. "In addressing and coping with these challenges, we will need to work together to become more efficient and meet those needs that are most essential to fulfilling our mission." The university's current budget for general operations is $44 million. State appropriations comprise about 64 percent of that budget, while tuition revenue makes up the difference. The university is seeking to minimize the impact on students and personnel and hopes to achieve the bulk of the savings through an extensive utility conservation program, reduced printing costs, implementation of a new telecommunications system, and across-the-board reductions in departmental travel and operating budgets. Additionally, the university will suspend plans to enhance three programs the freshman year experience, undergraduate research, and recruitment of underrepresented student groups into the nursing program that had received support and partial funding from the Board of Regents. "Because we are now faced with funding the basic operations of the university, we cannot undertake these targeted enhancements," Potter said. "Instead, we will return these funds as part of the cut, a total of $125,000, and we will maintain the level of funding in our original budget for these activities." The university will plan a comprehensive review of its course and program offerings with the goal of concentrating the faculty workload on required and high-demand courses. As a result, the university may reduce concentrations within degree programs that have limited student demand and are not tied to the university's programmatic strengths. Potter explained that if the percentage of cuts increases, the university must turn to personnel expenditures for further immediate savings. Approximately 83 percent of the university's general operations budget consists of personnel costs. "Rather than reducing the current workforce, we will review all vacancies and fund only those deemed essential to maintain critical services," Potter said. "This means that we will have to work together to improve instructional and operational efficiencies in all areas." The university currently has vacant faculty and staff positions totaling nearly $1 million in personnel costs. To help offset the loss in state-appropriated funds, North Georgia plans to explore potential revenue sources, including the expansion of summer programs, graduate programs and online courses and seeking private and federal funding as available. In closing the meeting, Potter told employees, "This situation is a real test of our resilience as a community; however, I believe we have the strength to survive this crisis and to thrive if we practice our values and care for each other."
North Georgia has started the first phase of updating its campus master plan, which will be submitted to the Board of Regents in 2009 and focus on establishing guidelines for campus growth and the best use of facilities, land and resources. A large part of the planning will involve how to reshape the current campus while identifying new development opportunities on Radar Ridge, property owned by North Georgia and its foundation and which effectively doubles the size of campus. Sasaki Associates, Inc., a consulting and design services firm previously involved in planning the new library, will collect data on campus buildings and capacity in early September, when it makes the first of several visits to campus. The firm will help formulate the master plan over the course of nine months with university committees and through meetings with on- and off-campus stakeholders. "As we grow, some departments will develop faster than others, so we'll need to define academically what our goals are so that our physical growth can be responsive to our academic growth," Julio Canseco, director of Project Management, said. "The bottom line is that we have to meet demand. The physical growth has to be responsive to our academic plan." The Board of Regents has placed an emphasis on retaining and maintaining the historical nature of the North Georgia campus, Canseco said, and that emphasis will be a primary consideration as architect group Lord Aeck & Sargent, selected to envision the future look of campus, contributes to the process. The planning process will run the gamut academic needs will be at the forefront, residential housing and enrollment projections will be assessed, and all of the university's property, from Pine Valley to Hurricane Creek, will be evaluated for efficiency of use. "The way we accommodate our near-term growth will in effect impact our future growth, the performance of our students and the relationship with the local community," Canseco said.
President
Potter will be hosting a series of monthly lunches that are intended to provide
faculty and staff with the opportunity to have open-ended dialogue and
conversation on any issue they think is worthy of discussion.
Dr. Bryson Payne, information and instructional technology, and a team of colleagues from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain, had their article "Multi-scale and Local Search Methods for Real Time Region Tracking with Particle Filters: Local Search Driven by Adaptive Scale Estimation on GPUs" published in the "Machine Vision and Applications Journal." The article is a result of research that began during Payne's grant-funded research fellowship at URJC last summer. Payne was also a participant in a computer-assisted video surveillance grant with the URJC team that was funded in January for $29,000 and is serving on his third doctoral dissertation committee in computer graphics/computer vision this fall through URJC.
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Back to The Digest University Relations | NGCSU Home Last modified on: Monday, 15 September 2008 15:53:02 -0400 by University Relations :: Disclaimer :: Accessibility |
Dr. M. Reza Nourbakhsh, physical therapy,
had the article "The Effect of Oscillating-Energy Manual Therapy on
Lateral Epicondylitis: A randomized, placebo-control, double-blinded
study" published in the January-March issue of the Journal of Hand
Therapy. Dr. Frank Fearon was the co-author. Nourbakhsh also had
"An Alternative Approach to Treating Lateral Epicondylitis: A
randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blinded study" published in the "Journal of Clinical Rehabilitation," July 2008.
