Traditional academic activities that could come under the Information Technology and Transfer (ITT) heading include mainframe/workstation computing, standard PC applications such as word processing, and simple database searching via the library's on-line catalog systems. These activities will continue to play an important role in research and providing these resources to faculty and students efficiently will continue to require careful management, especially in these times of tight budgets. At the minimum, our present research capabilities in computing should not be allowed to slowly deteriorate. This will require active management since our present hardware capabilities are primarily the result of an infusion of new capital equipment funds for the ECS building. Our needs in computing are fairly well understood, we just need prudent and farsighted management of scarce resources.
More problematic is how the university will respond to the great transformations now taking place in high speed networking, which are bringing about completely new capabilities and applications. For example, what level of network access should each faculty member have, and how will the university provide training and support for faculty use of the network? Much of this report will concentrate on how high-speed networks can enhance all types of faculty research activities.
The crucial role that communication plays in fostering research implies that network services must fulfill numerous faculty needs. First, and perhaps foremost, is the need for universal faculty (and student) access to high speed networks. Access to computer and network connections should be regarded as a necessity, just as we regard office space and telephones. In addition, UMBC's facilities should make maximum advantage of the Internet and other national and global research and education networks that are likely to develop in the next decade.
A second dimension in access is bandwidth, i.e., the speed with which a quantity of data can be transmitted or received by a communications network or terminal. The bandwidth demands of researchers can vary greatly. Researchers in the sciences and engineering are now dependent on high speed access to distributed sites for many activities. Their needs will continue to grow, as will their dependency on a high speed network access. The largest relative growth for network bandwidth, though, may very well come in the humanities and social sciences, as many original historical documents are digitized and made available over international networks.
It perhaps could go without saying that UMBC's network should have the capacity to meet its most demanding uses. The nature of telecommunication is that a network is only as strong as its weakest link. High speed national networks and workstations are useless if the campus's bandwidth is small; similarly, a high-speed campus network is wasted if the local connections and desktop computers have weak data handling capability. Since the mission of UMBC emphasizes research in the sciences and computing, our campus's network demands will be even stronger than might be the case at an average public university of our size. This means that UMBC must carefully examine any UM System wide plans for providing high-speed links to the Internet, and be certain that they will satisfy our particular needs. We may find it best, and cheaper, to procure Internet access on our own.
UMBC should carefully define what ITT functions should be universally available to faculty, and then provide these functions over a definite time frame, advertise their existence, train the user community to take advantage of these services, and ensure that these functions are kept close to state-of-the-art for university campuses. We should not pretend to supply ITT functions that we cannot properly support. This is especially important as ITT functions become more important in day-to-day activities and faculty begin to depend on these functions for critical tasks.
We also cannot emphasize more strongly the need for institutional staff support for the use of ITT in research. Without staff support much of our hardware investment in ITT will be underutilized.
ITT is an extremely dynamic field. UMBC needs to continually evaluate our technical approaches for providing services. We will need our on-campus ITT suppliers organized in a way that can facilitate change when it is in the best interests of the users and can at the same time save money. However, we must also make some certain strategic decisions on our overall approaches for supplying various ITT services, and build upon this strategic framework for as long as it is viable. ITT requires very careful planning, especially now with the merger of Academic and Administrative Computing. We also need the freedom to make some mistakes, and the resources to test prototypes, if we do indeed want to construct an ITT environment that fully serves the campus at the lowest cost in the long run.