Computing Facilities

The Gerry Martin Computer Resource Room

This website has an A-Z guide about IT in the History Faculty which summarizes the computer and IT Facilities in the Department. Please take the time to look at this. To contact us, please e-mail itsupport(at)history.ox.ac.uk or telephone +44(0)1865 615031

Introduction

Many IT facilities are provided centrally by Oxford University Computing Services, which in the summer of 2012 has joined forces with other central services to become Oxford University IT Services; however there are also some facilities available within the Faculty itself, tailored to the requirements of our staff and postgraduate students. 

Complete newcomers should have a look at the central university website http://welcometoit.ox.ac.uk for introductory information. Note in particular that you will be unable to register to use Oxford University IT Services and Facilities until you have obtained a University Card, which can be obtained from your college if you are a student, or from the Department Administrator.

E-Mail

All members of department are required to have and to use their university email account so that they may be contacted via the department maillists. The centrally-managed university email system operated by Oxford University Computing Services is called Nexus, and as well as handling mail, also enables you to share calendars for scheduling your University life.

Network Connection

The Department wired ethernet network links into the University 'backbone' and is part of the national joint academic network (JANET). The Faculty's network is the responsibility of the IT staff, who can provide instructions and help on connecting your own laptop into the University's network. In addition the University runs a centrally-managed wireless network available in most locations around the department and elsewhere in the city centre. For users working away from Oxford the university provides a secure Virtual Private Network service, which can also be used for accessing facilities such as online journals remotely.

Rules

All members of the Department, including academic visitors, are requested to read and agree to both the University's and the Department's rules for computer use.

Help and Advice

OUCS provides an extensive range of services for all members of the University, and the OUCS webpages (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk) are a very good source of IT help and advice. Additional help and advice is available from the Faculty's IT staff.

For Academic Staff

We strive to provide services efficiently for all academic staff, visitors and students at the Faculty. But please, help us to help you - if you know that you, or visitors are coming to Oxford and to the History Faculty, please let us know about it well in advance, so that we can prepare facilities properly for yourself or your academic visitors: better that we create an account or reserve filespace unnecessarily, than have to deal with impatient people on our doorstep!

Just as an outline of what we need to know from you, for each individual:

• Status of the new arrival
• Are they bringing their own computer?
• Is this a Windows PC, a Mac, or other?
• Can you provide the hardware network address (the 'MAC address') of this computer?
• Or do they need/ expect provision of facilities by the Faculty?
• Will they require a University email address?
• Will they need to be working from home very much - whether in Oxford, or elsewhere?
• If a visitor, do they have a budget specifically for IT support, eg printing?

The more of this material you can provide well in advance of arrival, the smoother the whole process will be. Please don't leave things for the visitor to arrange themselves once they are on our doorstep - this leaves a very bad impression all round! Likewise, when visitors leave, it is very important that we are informed about this too. We need to archive old accounts:

• For reasons of security - we need to know which accounts are 'live' and which may be being used illegitimately.
• For reasons of performance - the more accounts and file spaces there are on the servers, the slower everything runs.
• For data integrity - a user's data belongs to them, and we must ensure that it is secured, and cannot be modified by anyone else after the event.

Be assured that we can archive material for staff, visitors and other users, and nothing gets deleted out of hand - but only if we have an idea of the status of those people.

[Very many thanks to the Department of Materials, who allowed us to adapt and reuse elements of the style and content of their IT help pages]