Digital Services Lab: Library Macintosh Updates

Welcome back Students and Faculty to the new Fall Term at Providence College. Over the summer we took the opportunity to update, clean, and refresh the various Macintosh computers throughout the library. Updates included general maintenance as well as updating much of our software.

First, we updated software on all of the iMacs. The Suite of Adobe products that we have was updated this spring and we now have the Adobe Creative Suite 3 (or CS3) version of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, and Flash on the Macs in the Creation Station and the Digital Services Lab. The icons in the Doc are slightly different, but we now have the most up to date versions of the software. The new icons have a periodic table theme: a square with Ps for Photoshop, Ai for Illustrator, Id for InDesign, and so on. No software on the Information Station computer was updated.

We have also cleaned-out most of the existing user accounts on the Macintoshes. As you may know, whenever a user logs on using their own user name and password, rather than a generic account like libuser, a unique folder is created wherein specific preferences are created and files are saved by default. In order to keep the machines clean, and to allow other updates to propagate across users, we have deleted almost all of these folders on the Macs.

However, these files are not gone. We have archived all existing user folders before deleting them. So if you had been working on one of our iMacs in the Spring and had saved some files to the desktop, simply come and visit the Digital Services Lab and we should be able to pull your missing files from our archives. And all user folders will be recreated the first time a user logs on to the machine, so this maintenance won’t cause any problems for returning users and in fact will guarantee a cleaner and more up-to-date experience.

If you have any questions about Macintosh resources, scanners, or other library technology resources, feel free to stop by the Digital Services Lab in Room 110 on the main floor of Phillips Memorial Library.