Involved people at OAB: Di Luca, Merighi.
Concerning accessory services improvements, a new high-quality network printer LN20 (17 ppm, 600dpi, auto-duplex unit) has been bought. Also a color PostScript laser printer HP4500N, a DLT juke-box backup unit (7 x 20/40 GB tapes) and a Panasonic video-beam (twin-lamp, 1024x768 resolution , ceiling-mounted in the conference-room) have been bought on an Astronet grant from the Department of Astronomy.
The necessity of a color laser printer comes from the need to obtain presentation-quality transparencies, better than the ones produced by ink-jet printers already available.
The DLT juke-box has been bought to allow automatic backups on workstations with several GB of disk space. Nowadays EIDE or SCSI disks with 20-30 GB of capacity are commonly available and it would be impractical to back them up on DAT media.
The video-beam completes the conference-room equipment, as the use of slide-shows and computer-presentations during seminars and conferences has become quite common.