CBL Information Technology

The CBL IT Department provides end to end infrastructure support of all data networking, lab-sponsored collaborative file and web servers, telephone, video teleconferencing (distance education and distance meeting) plus AV support at the facility. The department is staffed with three IT professionals. All of the IT staff are cross-trained and generally available to handle a range of IT support services at the facility.

The IT department can be contacted either by email via our feedback mechanism for standard Helpdesk support or directly by phone with our frontline support staff at x345. Telephone issues should be addressed either by email subject line "telephone-issues" or by phone at x237. We also invite all to visit the campus intranet website as well which again contains news and FAQ's plus links to all of the services described below.

When you start work at CBL you will be provided with an email account and access to CBL's IT infrastructure as appropriate to your position.

The department provides an "open workstation lab" located in Mansueti Hall where the IT department itself is located. The lab is available 24x7 to all that have a swipe key to the building. The library in Beaven Hall has four general use workstations, three large display screens, and a integrated printer/copier accessible over the academic network.

The department also provides other resources including a software library with site maintained packages including popular Microsoft and APPLE products (all key MicrosoftWindows and APPLE MAC operating systems, Microsoft Office for Windows and MAC), Virus and MALWARE protection tools, Adobe CC, and a number of high end modeling, statistical, and geospatial analysis tools such as MATLAB, Mathematica, SAS, SPLUS, and the ESRI products via a buy-in/pool license arrangement. These specific packages are provided gratis to the researchers at the facility but only a set of pre-negotiated products is available, more specialized software tools not maintained by the IT department must be procured by the faculty themselves however the University of Maryland College Park campus OIT department, provides many at large academic discount or pool buy-in arrangements for University faculty, staff and students.

The IT department also provides procurement assistance with workstation and group server hardware requests. The IT department maintains a template/build approach to common PC hardware based workstations and small servers whereas common spares of key components are stockpiled for quick swap-out.

Lastly, the IT department is required to charge a nominal service fee for our efforts billed to any grant account provided and on an hourly basis. The dollar amount of this fee is set by the business office department. Telephone support and any lab IT infrastructure based issues are provided gratis to all (including telephone hardware, video teleconferencing, and AV) but helpdesk support for PC/workstation issues is charged with the first 15 minutes of our assistance free and then hourly charges applied afterward. A billing grant#/account request is generally emailed to the user after the task is complete stating the total amount of time we had committed to the task prior to its resolution.