The Owen Science and Engineering Library has six laptop computers available for current WSU students, staff, and faculty and which may be used in the Owen Library. The six HP Compaq Notebooks each have 2GB of RAM, as well as DVD/CDRW drives, wireless Internet access, and other standard features like Adobe Reader, Microsoft Office 2007, Real Player, IM packages, and SciFinder Scholar. One added feature of the laptops is the Pharos printing software for printing to the science library's black and white or color printers. These laptops are available for all day checkout; they are due back in by 15 minutes before the library closes. The laptops come packaged with a carrying case, power cords, mouse, and head phones.
The Owen Science and Engineering Library has eleven wireless access points to enable students and faculty to gain access to internet based library resources from laptops while in the library. The service is available to WSU students, faculty and staff. However, there are some areas with weak signal strength in the innermost study rooms. For more information about wireless service, please see WSU IT's wireless pages; see also a map of the areas on campus with wireless access.
The Owen Library has installed wired carrels to enable students and faculty to gain access to internet based library resources from laptops while in the library. The service is available to WSU students, faculty and staff. The carrels are located on the first floor of the Owen Library near the south end of the building, in the group study rooms located on the west side of floors 4 through 6 and also in carrels to the north end of the study rooms.
To use this service you will need:There is no charge for this service.
Almost all of the computers on the first floor of the Owen Science and Engineering Library have MS Office programs for students to use on a first come, first serve basis. Access, PowerPoint, Word, and Excel are installed on each of these computers. The library does not provide training with computer software. We do have print copies of Word for Dummies, Excel for Dummies, Access for Dummies, and Powerpoint for Dummies available for use in the first floor Reference area, and these can also be found through the Griffin catalog for viewing as electronic books.
A couple of notes about these computers:
1) If computer is in sleep-mode,
move the mouse and wait a few seconds and the computer will 'wake up'.
2) If the mouse is not moved for 20 minutes the computer may
reset, in which case all unsaved work will be lost.
3) Data saved on these stations' temp storage directories is erased daily - do not use these computers as storage.
There is a one "creativity station" in Owen, as well as at each Pullman campus library, which includes a scanner, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat, and ArcGIS software, in addition to having all the programs found on the other workstations. This station is also first-come first-served, but people need the scanner or unique software will be given precedence over other users. In Owen, this station can be found at the computer pod closest to the main entrance. The Owen creativity station also has ArcGIS software (also available in Holland/Terrell), plus the ability to accept a variety of memory cards.
As noted above, the library does not provide training with computer software. We do have print copies of How to do everything with Adobe Acrobat 8 and Photoshop CS3 for Dummies available for use in the first floor Reference area, and various GIS help books are available for checkout.