My Life as a Computer Officer

From 11th February, 2002 I was employed as a Senior Computing Technician in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Cambridge University. This was a 'T4' University Assistant Staff post.

With effect from 1st January, 2003 I was metamorphosed into a Computer Officer which is an Academic Related post. This elevation (which is largely due to the determined work of my boss) brings a welcome boost in salary and a number of other perks but the job essentially remains the same: my ego insists that I was only ever a technician in name alone.

I report to the Faculty Administrator and I'm responsible for all aspects of the Faculty's computing facilities. There are three main parts to this:

• Supporting Faculty staff (academic, administrative, library and research) in their use of computer equipment and software

• Maintaining records of all the Faculty's hardware, software and licences

• Developing and maintaining the Faculty web-site (since my promotion, I am now, ex officio, the Faculty Webmaster)

It's a very varied job: no two days are alike and the mixture of background tasks and urgent support requests means I keep busy on all kinds of things all day long. For somebody who unashamedly likes working with computers, likes collecting and organising information and likes building web-pages it's a great job!

The academical year 2003-2004 added a significant extra dimension to my job: taking responsibility for equipping a computer-aided language learning centre witin the Faculty.

Support tasks include:

• Installing and configuring new computers

• Installing, upgrading and configuring software

• Installing and configuring external and internal peripherals

• Selecting and ordering hardware, software and licences

• Advising staff on using their computers, peripherals and applications software and solving chronic and acute problems they experience

• Advising staff with the specification of proposed hardware and software acquisitions

• Acting as the University Computing Service's official point of contact within the Faculty

• Liaison with the Computer Officer for the School of Arts & Humanities (this item is now defunct, following the suppression of the School Computer Officer's post early in 2004)

Record-keeping activities include:

• Creating and populating a database of hardware, software and licences held within the Faculty

• Managing IP addresses allocated within the Faculty

• Managing the Faculty's e-mail domain

• Maintaining electronic mailing lists for groups of Faculty staff and students

Work on the Faculty web-site includes:

• Writing and maintaining HTML web-pages

• Advising on restructuring the site to improve accessibility

• Creating a section of the site for internal material separate from the public area

• Analysing web access logs