Mac attack: Bower Break in leaves library short on resources

There are still some Macs available, though


In the early hours of the morning of the 11th January, Bower Ashton Library suffered a break in in which all the Macbooks were stolen and the Laptop locker system was left needing major repairs.

The Macbooks at Bower are a popular resource for students especially when campus is busy and all the fixed PC’s in the library are being used. Although all the libraries fixed PC’s remain to be intact, the theft has reduced the Library’s IT provision by over 50% says Pete Smyth, Student Administration Team Administrator for Bower Ashton.

He said, “ Following this incident, colleagues from ITS, Library Services and the Faculty have worked together to find alternative IT provisions for students while conversations continue regarding replacement.”

In order to ensure that students are able to access computer with the correct software, in addition to the 23 fixed PC’s still useable in the library, 17 Laptops have been sourced and can be manually loaned from the Library desk for a maximum of 24 hours. These laptops have Adobe Creative Suite installed and will be available from Monday 1st February.

Students have also been reminded that PC’s are available to be booked out using the online booking system up to 1 week in advance.

In order to cope with the loss of computers and to make more of the computer in the EPI Centres at Bower more accessible some teaching sessions have been move to Arnolfini and the Yellow Room will be kept as an open access room as much as possible.

As annoying as it is, the staff at Bower are doing all they can to ensure that the impact for students isn’t too drastic but if you really can’t handle not being able to hire a Mac, Arnolfini has 2 Epi Centre’s with 16 Macs each.