One of the challenges of late has been making sure the UVa
databases are all accessible for free.
The ship provides only two hours of free Internet access to students and
once they go through that then they have to buy more, and it's expensive. But because so much work is done through online
sources, the ship provides a number of websites for free, including all of the
licensed databases provided at UVa. But our system of doing that is new and still being perfected, and some of our databases aren't recognized by the ship's server as being free sites, so each day begins with an hour or so testing over a dozen of our main
databases. This takes a while because
internet access is very slow on the ship.
Our internet access is via satellite, and as our IT director reminds us,
we have to beam a signal from the ship to a satellite, then down to UVa, then
back to a satellite, then back down to the ship. So, it can sometimes take a couple of minutes
to even get to a database, especially when there are a lot of people online.
Why does the ship only provide two hours of free
internet? Our bandwidth is not very
wide, and if everybody was online all the time, especially with non-academic
activities (email, Facebook, YouTube, etc.)
then our internet access would not only crawl but probably stop altogether,
so the ship has to limit access. But
that’s why we also provide free access to academic resources. It’s a balancing act.
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