Residence crunch eases

“The residence overcommitment problem has been resolved,” says Chris Read, university housing officer. Online messages go out today to approximately 4,000 incoming first-year students who have been accepted into residence this fall, telling them exactly where they will be living in September.

UW guarantees that all first-year students who apply by the deadline will live in residence if they wish to. Earlier this year the housing and residences department found themselves committed to housing 600 more students than anticipated, the result of an unexpectedly large incoming class.

In a memo yesterday, Bud Walker, director of university business operations, notes: “There have been various decisions made regarding the 2007 overcommitment of residence spaces in relation to the first-year residence guarantee. The overcommitment of just over 600 UW residence spaces will be mitigated by a number of strategies.”

One stratagem was to reassign 242 spaces normally given to upper-year and grad students — for example, in Columbia Lake Village — to first-year students. These are “uncommitted” upper-year spaces, Walker says, meaning that grad students might have applied for them but had not yet been accepted.

“Upper-year students who have been accepted into residence will stay there,” Read says. “We will honour that commitment.”

Upper-year students who applied for one of the 242 reassigned places will still be accommodated, Walker says, “in part, in off-campus buildings where we have made arrangements for contiguous blocks of apartment units. The rest will be given assistance by the Off-Campus Housing Office in securing suitable accommodation in the local community.”

The second stratagem was the creation of 120 triples – rooms with three students instead of two — in Ron Eydt Village, at a lower cost than a double. Allocating 360 students to triples yielded another 120 new spaces.

Students had until early July to make their residence choices. Nearly 300 of them selected a triple as one of their top three or four choices, Read says; the other 60 expressed no preference.

Roughly 200 first-year students have not yet been assigned a room, but Read says they will be accommodated by September. “We called them all and told them that they will definitely have places to live on campus,” he says. Over the summer, as many as 200 incoming students normally withdraw from the university, or decide not to live in residence; housing managers are counting on this attrition to find most of the remaining spaces.

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Archives: 50 years at your fingertips

The university’s 50th anniversary brought an extra buzz to UW’s quietly busy Archives. “We anticipated a lot of demand stemming from the 50th anniversary celebration,” says Jane Britton, UW’s special collections archivist (left). “And there was: but it didn’t come where and when we expected.”

Archives is where everything by and about the University of Waterloo is preserved. Located in the Doris Lewis Rare Book Room in Dana Porter Library, the collection now includes more than 10,000 photographic prints, negatives, and slides, more than 12,000 packages of UW Graphics negatives, and enough clippings, publications and ephemera to fill 340 feet of shelving. Another 2,200 linear feet of university records are stored in the Commissary building.

The 50th anniversary spurred activity across campus, Britton says. “Requests came from all over, and people were asking for things long before we were ready, possibly because the planning committees for the 50th started work so early.”

Some of the products of this activity include Ken McLaughlin’s book, Out of the Shadow of Orthodoxy, which drew heavily on archives and special collections for historical data and images; the athletics department’s book, 50 years of Battle, and photo gallery; and UW’s 50th anniversary website. Britton also chose the photos shown in the 50th anniversary launch loop. And many departments asked for images to add an anniversary flavour to their web banners or event invitations.

“We were also busy because this was the City of Waterloo’s 150th anniversary,” Britton says. Archives supplied many images for Waterloo Public Library’s online “Waterloo 150” feature – profiles of people prominent in the city’s history, including many with connections to UW.

A major project of the 40th anniversary in 1997 was a travelling display of photographic prints from Archives. In 2007, the display is digital — the 50th anniversary image bank. Its foundation was an image preservation project that Archives began early in 2006, with the goal of creating digital copies of all photos not taken by university photographers. These photos are more vulnerable than UW-source photos. Nearly 1,700 images were scanned, catalogued and assigned subject headings.

“We piggybacked the 50th anniversary image bank project on that,” Britton says. For the anniversary year, they obtained permission to add nearly 800 photos from the K-W Record Photographic Negative Collection.

“The Record covered events on campus extensively in the early years,” Britton says. “I think the most fun I’ve had in preparing for this anniversary was going through the K-W Record negatives and finding never-before-seen images of people and events on campus. I often had to do quite a bit of digging. Sometimes I would find an interesting image and then, in an effort to flesh out the caption satisfactorily, I would have to find out what the story was behind it.”

For example, negative 67-1452 was labelled only: University of Waterloo, torch bearer, Feb. 3, 1967. “What torch? From where? Why? The clippings files and the Record gave me the story. A dozen UW students ran in relays from Ottawa to Waterloo with a torch lit from the centennial flame at the Parliament Buildings. They took 57 ½ hours to run 309 miles. It was done in honour of the university’s 10th anniversary and was part of the university’s winter carnival.”

The image bank – nearly 2,500 images available to anyone with a UWdir username and password – is very popular. It’s easy to use: log on, enter a search term, and see what pops up. In 1997, by contrast, searching for a photo meant hours or days looking through boxes of prints.

Technology has also made it much easier to research the records, documents and other materials in Archives. In 1997, researchers had to work through binders of collection contents lists to locate the items they wanted. Often the quickest route was through the archivist’s memory.

“After the 40th,” Britton says, “we began to create a searchable database that shows researchers exactly where to look for the materials they want.” The project lasted eight years. Now, a researcher can enter a search term and almost instantly get a list of all relevant materials.

Of course, an archivist’s work is never done. When the 50th anniversary year is over, the tangible products – minutes of meetings, books, magazines, newspaper supplements, ads, posters, photos, decals, pins, even Frisbees – will flow to the Archives.

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The work goes on

The elevator in South Campus Hall will be out of service from Monday at 8 a.m. to Friday, August 17, at 5 p.m. The elevator is being upgraded. . . . More road work starting next Tuesday, at the entrance to the ECE parking lot: the watermain tie-in for the Psychology addition is going through. One lane of traffic will be open at all times, says the memo from Don Haffner, Plant Operations — but pedestrian traffic will be re-routed. Work is expected to take two days: “There may be some inconvenience and/or delays.”

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