Graduate Research Overview
Graduate Research
As a major research institution, the University of Illinois maintains outstanding facilities for graduate study and research. The University Library's resources are exceptional, with 10 million volumes, 9 million microforms, 148,000 audio recordings, 12,000 films, 650,000 maps, and 90,000 periodical, serial, and newspaper subscriptions. With these holdings, the University's library system is the largest of any public university in the nation, and third among all U.S. universities. The comprehensiveness of the bibliographic and reference materials facilitates research on any subject.
The University of Illinois has consistently been at the forefront of developments in computing applied to both research and teaching. The location of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications on the Urbana-Champaign campus is just one example of the University's leadership in this area. The University owns a vast array of computer resources, ranging from supercomputers to 3,000 public access workstations in labs located in classroom buildings and residence halls, virtually all networked for easy access. The Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES) office provides computer support of all kinds--facilities, training, and so on--guided by the principle that all users should have easy access to whatever computing services will facilitate their research and study.
The Department of Speech Communication supplements the University's resources by maintaining the Woolbert Computing Laboratory (231 Lincoln Hall) for the department's graduate students and faculty and the Instructional Computing Laboratory (310 Lincoln Hall) to support students registered in undergraduate and graduate courses taught by the department. The laboratories include machines running Windows and Macintosh operating systems. The machines offer access to several software programs for email, web browsing, word processing, spreadsheet analysis, presentation preparation, web publishing, video encoding, CD production, scanning, optical character recognition, and statistical analysis. In addition, several faculty members provide students access to computers in their research laboratories and collaboratories. All computers and printers in the department are networked via the campus backbone to the University's Computing and Communication Service Office network, the University on-line library catalog and book checkout system, and more generally to the Internet and the World Wide Web. The department also maintains a secure internal network supported by a 120 GB server for printing, storing files, and publishing web sites. The server runs on the Windows operating system and uses an Athlon class processor running at 1 Ghz with 512 MB RAM. In addition, the Department's Woolbert Media Laboratory (240 Lincoln Hall) offers equipment for collecting and coding videotaped data and systems for video recording off-the-air broadcasts and cablecasts for analysis.