NJIT’s Information Services and Technology help desk will move to the Van Houten Library, which should give users a better experience.
The move takes place over the next few weeks, both motivated by IST’s desire for a prominent, more modern facility and the role of the library as a technology center in the 21st century.
Kamalika Sandell, vice provost and chief information officer for the university, explained that the change is part of the broader maturity of information technology services on campus. He knew most people only knew his department through the help desk, so he brought first -level help services to campus, adopted the ServiceNow application and expanded support after hours, all of which helped. to enhance response times and quality.
“The mission of support and access is core to IST, it is embedded in the name of our division and it is intertwined with the mission of the library to establish its identity as digital commons. We have been able to from the older location of ServiceDesk at the Student Mall, ”Sandell said.
Being closer to the Guttenberg Information Technologies Center will also help his goal, as that is where his own office and the rest of the Information Services and Technology department are based, along with related organizations such as Media & Technology Support Services along with Ying Wu College of Computing.
The current help desk space, in the student mall under the Summit Street parking deck, will be used for the forensic science laboratory, which is managed by the Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science.
Further improvements will come in the near future, Sandell and University Librarian Ann Hoang said. The new help desk will offer a laptop loaner service for students facing financial challenges. The library is also renovating the computer laboratory to become an Information Training Laboratory, mainly for teaching new students, as NJIT’s online resources and databases are smaller than most high schools. Sandell wants to improve information technology processes throughout the university, such as automating processes that are now manual and making things easier to find on university websites.
Hoang is also pushing for more open-source electronic textbooks, known as open educational resources within the field. That project started two years ago. Teachers who received the NJIT sabbatical grant to produce such materials include professors John Carpinelli, Rachel Rongfang Liu and Rajpal Sodhi, all with Newark College of Engineering, with Shahriar Afkhami having a dual appointment in Mathematical Sciences and Department of Data Science. Ryan Tolboom of Ying Wu College of Computing is also making a toolkit for his open-source book, with a grant through the U.S. Department of Education’s Open Textbook Collaborative Project, which is locally managed by Middlesex College.