Geography

IT resources

The Department of Geography uses a Faculty maintained IT laboratory, located in Buckingham Building, to support its main GIS and IT based teaching activities. This laboratory will be used by Geography staff and students in conjunction with the Photogrammetry Laboratory, the Physical Laboratory, the main teaching suites located in the Portland Learning Resources Centre (Portland LRC) in Portland Building and the Open Access areas in the Library.

Systems

The IT Lab in Buckingham Building offers 30 identical high-specification PCs for dealing with the specialist workload of advanced IT and GIS work. The PCs are fitted with high quality graphic adapters and provide local storage facilities: both are provided to enable working with the large file and image sizes that can be part of GIS. The CPU and memory size are designed to make large volume calculations and statistics possible.

All site licensed specialist software is also available in Portland Building and the Library.

Backup

All students receive a 1GB secure storage allocation on the network, which is regularly backed up and offers remote access facilities, for access when not connected to the university network.

Network

The systems have Intranet and Internet access via the Department switched-Ethernet subnet and provide access to all the standard University applications.

Software

In addition to the standard software the systems are all equipped with specialist GIS software. The current software packages used are:

  • ArcGIS
  • ArcView
  • MapInfo
  • Erdas Imagine
  • Leica Photogrammetry Suite
  • Surfer

All laboratory systems are also installed with the Oracle Developer Suite. The Developer software comprises a suite of client-based development tools which operate with the Oracle 10 RDBMS mounted on the University Sun Solaris Server.

Data Capture

The Photogrammetry Laboratory in Buckingham Building offers a range of data capture technologies, including an A0 map scanner, a book scanner and two A0 digitising tables. 

Printing

Laboratory users have access to a laser printer located in the room as well as the printing resources provided in Portland LRC. The LRC provides output in black and white or colour in any format up to A0.