"The Olin building has set the standard for aca-demic and administrative computing on campus," said Ray Phillips, director of information technology services. It is equipped with more than $250,000 worth of computers and ancillary equipment, the largest one-building technology investment in the College's history, says Phillips. Sixty-five Power Macintosh computers with 1.2 gigabyte hard drives are located in several clusters throughout the building, providing students with "abundant access," according to Phillips. "All of these computers have tremendous capability," he said. "In addition to the basic computers, there are two high-end computers; but even the basic machines are spectacular machines." A high-speed Ethernet data network serves as the spine of the building's technological framework. The network moves 10 million bytes (or pieces of information) per second from one computer to another. A typical modem connection exchanges information at a rate of about 28,000 bytes per second. Phillips says that because the pace of technological change is so rapid, the Olin building's infrastructure was designed to be upgradable when current hardware and software are replaced by faster, more powerful successors. "Anything we could buy today will fairly rapidly be obsolete," he said. "We haven't locked ourselves into a particular technology, so we have the flexibility to change as improvements occur." Phillips says the key is having the cable in place to handle the massive amounts of information passing through the computer network. Although the Ethernet is prodigiously fast, it consumes only a small portion of the capacity of the cable installed by the College. Phillips says the cable can easily handle the next generation of networking, asynchronous transfer mode, which is 10 times faster than Ethernet. Throughout the building, video capability is a recurring characteristic. Several labs and classrooms have ceiling-mounted projectors and recessed display screens that descend at the push of a button. "Video is an important teaching resource, especially in the sciences," Cole said. "We wanted to have this capability available right in the rooms, which maximizes the potential for its use."
	"The planning of the building really was based on curriculum," said Cole. "We wanted to move from a curriculum in which projects were spelled out to less predictability and more hands-on work. We wanted to push students to think and to problem-solve and to do real-world kinds of projects. To do that, our spaces weren't configured properly. We had to change the orientation of laboratories, we had to re-equip space with state-of-the-art equipment, we needed to have lecture halls with full audio-visual capability and computer- projection capability." Physical spaces were designed to allow students easy access to faculty and study resources by configuring teaching laboratories, research labs and faculty offices in clusters. "The student can be working on research projects here [in the research lab] and they're near the faculty mentor," Cole said. "The faculty teach in labs across the hall so students can be working over there and come across the hall and ask questions. That access to faculty was one of the big issues." According to Professor of Geology Robert Nelson, the new labs in Olin for paleo-environmental study "are undoubtedly the finest such labs in the state of Maine and possibly in all of New England." Nelson says the Olin laboratories are far superior to the contaminant-friendly settings students endured before. The air in the palynology laboratory is filtered to remove extraneous fine dust, which might include pollen that could degrade samples, and the macro-fossil laboratory has a special sink with a ventil-ation vent to extract fumes created during the separation of insect remains from sediments. "In years past we have been making do with a fume hood in the mineralogy laboratory in Mudd, a room with unfiltered air, a lot of mineral specimens being handled, windows continually being opened by students and a tremendous amount of student traffic, all of which created potential contamination problems," Nelson said. "For the macrofossil extractions, we were using a `dirty lab' in the basement level of Mudd, with an exterior door propped open and a large fan in the door to the lab to blow out the fumes. It was hardly convenient and definitely less than optimal." Faculty in other disciplines report similar advantages. David Firmage, Clara C. Piper Professor of Environmental Studies, says students in his Biology 493 course--who produce a 150-page report on water quality and land use patterns in the North Pond watershed of the Belgrade Lakes chain--will benefit from advanced digital mapping systems that allow them to create and manipulate maps using different variables of soil types, elevation, slope and other environmental factors. "The data analysis center will become a great blessing as the students work on their map applications," Firmage said. "A chemical analysis center adjacent to their lab allows all of the water chemistry to be done in dedicated space, making their work both easier and more accurate."
	The building also features two groundwater monitoring wells, believed to be the only wells housed in an environmental science building at a college or university in the United States. They resulted from a serendipitous visit Assistant Professor of Geology Paul Doss made to the excavation site of the building's elevator shaft. "I looked down into the hole they had made for the shaft and saw groundwater," he said. "That's when it occurred to me that we could dig our own well." One of the wells is a modest 15 feet deep; the other reaches 110 feet beneath the basement of the Olin Building. The monitoring station is located in a nondescript room in the lower level where a device that rises and falls with the groundwater level records the data on a spool of paper. Doss says students can identify "earth tides" by following the fluctuating groundwater levels resulting from the moon's and sun's gravitational pull on the earth's crust. The paint was not even dry on the walls of most of the building when academic work in this room had begun. Last year Andrew Flint '96 gathered samples and analyzed them for a senior project that contributed to Flint's acceptance at Western Michigan University's graduate program in hydrogeology. In addition to the formidable facilities housed in the Olin Science Center, the building's presence has produced a ripple effect through the entire science complex. Laboratory and classroom space in Arey, Keyes and Mudd has been or will be renovated to provide dedicated space for specific disciplines and sub-disciplines and to fit the College's new curri-culum, which emphasizes education through research, says Cole. "Because the ecology labs are now housed in Olin, the northern half of the third floor of Arey is dedicated research space for four biology faculty," said Professor of Biology Frank Fekete. "This space makes available an entire lab bench for research space and a perimeter bench that will accommodate student desks, computers and analytical instruments." The Olin construction was seen as part of a larger package, Cole says, which included the renovation of existing facilities. The vision was to reinvent the science program, using the new facilities as a spring-board. It was a vision 10 years in the making. [CONTINUE]