HPC Guidelines
Introduction
The Humanities Publication Center (HPC) supports the work of many different organizations and individuals. Common courtesy is sufficient to prevent or resolve most of the conflicts that inevitably arise from the different needs of these organizations and individuals. We hope that the few simple rules contained in this Guide will resolve the rest and keep the Center running smoothly.
Each person who uses the Center is asked to read this Guide, become familiar with its contents, and sign an agreement to abide by its precepts. If a copy of the agreement is not attached, please obtain a copy from the director of his secretary. Your suggestions for improving this Guide and the operations of the HPC are welcome.
Purpose of the HPC
The primary purpose of the HPC is to give advanced editing students hands-on experience working with actual publications. To obtain publications for students to work on, the Center provides a full range of editorial and publishing services to BYU faculty and organizations. The HPC also provides support for student journals. Students who enroll in appropriate sections of English 430R or who work on one of the student journals supported by the HPC are welcome to use the facilities of the Center.
HPC Staff
- Director: Mel Thorne (378-1719, mel_thorne@byu.edu)
- Student secretary: Melinda Keefe (378-4455)
- Student editorial assistants:
- AmyLyn Reynolds
- Jeff Creer
- Mat Rayback
HPC Phones
There are three phone lines at the HPC. Two are for official business of the Center and should be answered and used only by the HPC staff. Please do not answer or use 378-1719 (for the director) or 378-4455 (for the Center). When these lines are answered by anyone other than the HPC staff, important messages may not get to the phone mail and Center clients may get misinformed.
Other students and faculty are welcome to use the third line, 378-3553. This line should be used for all personal calls and all calls related to student journals. Phone mail is available on this line for student journals (please, no personal messages). Messages left on the student journal line will be transcribed and put in your mail boxes. For more information, see the director or his student secretary.
Please ask anyone who needs to call you at the HPC to use 378-3553.
Responsibilities of Student Editors
The chief student editor of each student journal supported by the Center needs to keep the director supplied with a current staff list each semester, so that the director can know the students who are the authorized users of the Center from that journal. The list should include the full name and phone number of each staff member that will use the Center. In addition, the chief student editor should ask each staff member to read these Guidelines.
Each student who wishes to use the HPC and its facilities needs to read this Guide and sign the form (attached) agreeing to follow it.
All of the chief editors are expected to attend a brief meeting near the beginning of each semester with the director of the HPC to coordinate the use of the Center and its facilities. Faculty advisors of the student journals are also encouraged to attend these meetings.
Building Use
The Humanities Publication Center is open for use whenever a keyholder is present. The Director or his secretary will usually be in the Center during regular office hours (9 to 5). The HPC staff, the chief editor of each student journal, and other staff members of the student journals who need after-hours access can be issued keys to the Center for the period of their involvement. To obtain a key, please bring a written request from your chief editor or faculty adviser to the director.
The two offices on the main floor of the Crandall House West do not belong to the Center. Please be courteous to the other tenants of the building; don’t block their doors with chairs, book bags, coats, or boxes, and keep the noise level reasonable when using the main floor.
Security
Keyholders agree to look after the facility and its contents while they are in the building. The last keyholder in the building is expected to lock all of the interior and exterior doors (don’t forget the doors to the outside from rooms 104 and 106). Because we have had few problems with security recently, we can perhaps be lenient in allowing students without keys to remain in the building, if they understand how to lock the building without a key and agree to do so (by locking the workroom doors by hand, throwing the dead bolts on the two exterior doors downstairs and on the front door, and then going out the door next to the copier—the only exterior door with a spring bolt). But if any keyholder is uncomfortable taking responsibility for leaving students in the building, he or she is authorized to ask the students to leave.
If you are ever asked to leave the building, please respect the authority and responsibility of the keyholder and leave courteously; the keyholder has to make a difficult decision between being nice to you and protecting the Center and its contents, and this is especially difficult if he or she does not know you.
Please close the blinds or curtains after dark, for your protection and to protect our computer equipment.
General Tidiness
The HPC is used by many people every day. Because all of the equipment and furniture must therefore be available for multiple use, you may not leave personal belongings or work material on the desks or tables, even if you are going to be gone from the building for only an hour. Each student employee and each student journal has space allocated in drawers or on shelves, so that material can be put away between uses of the building. If you do not have enough space or do not know what space to use to store your material, please contact the director or his secretary. Papers and other items left on desks, chairs, coat racks, or the conference table will be placed in the lost and found.
Please do not hang fliers, posters, or art work on the walls or bulletin board without the permission of the HPC director.
Lost and Found
Personal or work items left out on tables, computer desks, or other common use areas will be placed in the lost and found, which is located on the shelves across from the copier, unless we can ascertain which student journal the material belongs to, in which case we will place it in that journal’s mailbox. Periodically the contents of the HPC lost and found will be taken to the central university lost and found. Notice will be posted just before items are taken to the university lost and found.
Reference Books and Publications
Reference works are available on a bookshelf in the entry and on the reference desk in room 106. Sample journals and a couple of reference newsletters are displayed in the conference room. Feel free to make use of these materials, but do not remove them from the HPC and please replace them each day on the shelves where you found them, even if you plan to use them on subsequent days, so that they are available to others.
Conference Room
Feel free to use the conference room for meetings or personal study whenever the room is not being used or is not reserved (reservations are listed on a printed schedule attached to the white board in the room; this schedule is reprinted weekly, and reservations are subject to change as the needs of organizations change). To reserve the room, follow the instructions on the schedule or contact the director or his secretary.
In order to keep the work rooms downstairs as quiet as possible for multiple users, please hold staff meetings in the conference room whenever possible, and whenever you do not need to use a computer during your meeting.
You may use the white board in the conference room, but be sure to copy any information that you wish to keep, since the board may be erased as needed by the next users of the room. Please leave the room clean and tidy—we have no maid.
Mail and Messages
On top of the shelves at the bottom of the stairs is a box containing slots for the student journals and others that use the Center. Mail and phone messages for these people and organizations will be placed in those slots, so please check and empty your slots regularly.
Food and Drink
The kitchen is open for your use; feel free to use the microwave, and there are some dishes available to all in the cabinet to the left of the sink. But no one is available to wash your dishes and tidy up, so please do so yourself as soon as you have finished. Please do not leave dishes in the sink.
Feel free to use the refrigerator, but please be reasonable—leave room for other users and remove items you no longer want or need. The ice in the freezer and the water chilled in the large pitcher in the refrigerator are available to all. Periodically we will need to clean the refrigerator and discard long-unused items, but we will always warn you before we do so.
Do not take any food or drink downstairs.
Supplies
We will try to keep sufficient office supplies, such as pens, clips, and paper, on or in the desks or near the printer and copier. Feel free to use these supplies for official work, but please do not remove them from the Center for personal use. Whenever you need more, please see the director or his secretary.
Deliveries
Office supplies and boxes containing copies of new publications are occasionally delivered to the HPC. They should be delivered directly to room 190, the storage room at the end of the hall in the basement. If no HPC staff are present when a delivery is made, please ask the delivery people to take the boxes to the storage room in the basement (room 190).
Parking, Bikes
Except for the 30-minute parking spot, all parking on the street and on the asphalt between the curb and the buildings/bushes is reserved for A parking between 7:00 and 4:00. If you park on the asphalt after hours, please be courteous. Don’t block access or exit by parking in the driveways or so close to the light pole that no one else can get in or out. Please report any parking difficulties to the HPC director or his secretary.
Bikes may be parked and locked in the bike rack in front of the adjacent Crandall House East. Please do not bring any bikes into the building.
Equipment Use
The computers in the HPC are provided for the use of the students who work in the Center, either on HPC projects or on student journals. Personal use of the computers is permissible as long as it does not interfere with official use or with the smooth running of the Center or the computers. However, you may not install any software without the permission of the director.
Personal printing and copying cannot be offered by the Center, for obvious financial and administrative reasons.
Scheduling Computers
In general, the paid staff of the HPC have first priority on the use of the computers. However, at certain scheduled times each week, the staffs of specific student journals have first priority over certain computers (see the table below). Even at the most heavily scheduled times, there are almost always some computers that are available on a first-come, first-served basis. It is easiest to find an idle computer in the mornings and gets progressively more difficult as the day goes on.
You may use any idle computer at any time, even if someone else has priority for that computer for that time; but you are expected to relinquish it courteously if the user with priority requests it.
Priority for the use of the HPC computers is listed in the following table. These priorities will be reviewed and updated each semester. It may be necessary at some time to reduce some of these priorities to meet the future needs of other journals or organizations. Contact the HPC director to arrange for time to be scheduled for your organization.
| Computers | Person or organization | Days & Times |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Melinda Keefe (secretary) | M, W & F, 1–4 p.m., T & Th, 9–12 a.m. |
| 2 | Melinda Keefe (secretary) | M, W & F, 1–4 p.m., T & Th, 9–12 a.m. |
| 3 | Leading Edge | T & Th, 7–9 p.m.; S, 10–12 |
| 4 | Linda Hunter Adams | As needed |
| 4 | HPC student staff | As needed |
| 4 | Leading Edge | T & Th, 7–9 p.m.; S, 10–12 a.m. |
| 4 | Inscape | W, 7–10 p.m. |
| 4 | Life, the Universe, and Everything | S, 2–4 p.m. |
| 5 | Life, the Universe, and Everything | S, 2–4 p.m. |
| 6 | ||
| 7 & 8 | Insight | As needed (owned by Honors) |
| 9 | Collegiate Post | As needed (owned by Post) |
In addition to these regular priorities and perhaps overriding them, temporary priorities may be established when a student journal is on deadline (within days of going to press). These temporary priorities may be arranged with the director of the HPC and will be posted in the conference room and on the downstairs bulletin board.
New Mac OS
Mac OS 10.2 is being installed on all HPC Macs. If you are not already familiar with the new operating system, you will need to learn how to use it. It is not difficult to learn, but if you want some help, there is a reference book on the reference shelf.
Home Base for Files
One feature of the new OS is that each user has a separate home on each computer, reached through the use of a password. We will take advantage of this feature to keep each student journal’s or organization’s files secure. You will be assigned a single computer where you will be asked to keep all of your files. You can use any available additional computer by taking your files there on a zip disk and logging in as a guest (with the password guest), but at the end of your work session you need to transfer your files back to your home base and delete them from the hard drive of the computer where you were a guest. Do not leave your files on any computer other than the one assigned to you for your files.
The following are the home base assignments (if you foresee a problem or wish a different home base, contact the HPC director):
|
|
You do not necessarily have priority to use the computer that is your home base—that depends on the scheduling above. If someone else is using your home base, you can ask them to stop working long enough for you to copy the files you want onto a zip disk, which you can then transfer to an idle computer to work on.
Please name your folders and files clearly and completely. If a file gets misplaced in the wrong folder and it is named something generic like “cover” or “article 1,” we may have a difficult time helping you relocate it. Better names include specific identifiers and dates, such as “Williams INS 1/12” for an article by a person named Williams for Insights that was saved on January 12, or “TLE rev1 1/24” for the first review planned for the current issue of The Leading Edge saved on January 24.
Back up your files frequently onto some removable storage disk—it would be wise to do so at least at the end of every work session. (We will do a weekly backup of the entire Documents folder of each Mac, but you should make your own more frequent backups.) Save heavily edited files frequently under a new name, using the “Save As” command; one easy way to rename the file is to add a new date at the end of the file name; using “Save As” will unfragment the file and provide you multiple generations for emergency recovery.
You will have greater success with image files if you save them in TIFF format, using ASCII rather than binary format. They will print better on our laser printer and will work better for final printing. Please ask if you have any questions.
When you complete a project (such as an issue of a student journal), delete superceded versions of your files and consolidate the current files into one folder within the Document folder of your assigned computer; make your own backup of the folder, and then notify the director in writing that you have a folder ready to be archived (include the folder name). We will burn archive CDs (one for the Center and one for you) and then remove the folder from the computer hard drive.
Conflicts between the operating system, software programs, and utilities can make the computers unstable. Do not install any software onto any HPC computer with out permission from the director. Unauthorized software will be deleted without notice. Do not download music files or any other files from the Internet onto the hard drives of HPC computers—this helps us avoid viruses and keep plenty of available hard drive space for authorized files.
Copier, Printers, and Fax
Please do not try to replace the toner in the copier, printer, or fax yourself; instead, report to the director or his secretary any notice or evidence of low toner. Personal printing and copying cannot be offered by the Center, for obvious financial and administrative reasons.
Color Printer. The Epson color printer is to be used only for printing proofs of color covers and proofs of any other color artwork for official publications. Because the paper and ink are very expensive, please use this printer as little as possible, but don’t hesitate to use it for legitimate proofing. To obtain high quality paper for the best proofs, see Mel Thorne or the HPC secretary—this may require some advance planning so that you are not faced with wanting to print a proof when neither is available to get the paper for you.
Reporting Problems
When you have a problem with one of the HPC computers, please notify the director in writing. The more detail you can give the better, such as what you were doing, what error messages if any were displayed, and what you tried to do to overcome the problem.
Energy Saving
In accordance with the university’s attempt to conserve energy, please turn off all equipment at the end of the day.