Vice-Chancellor's Report 1978-82

computing needs of the University and the new machine was able to provide increased storage, peripherals and capabilities. But even wi th the installation of this more sophisticated machine, usage of the computer processing unit had more than doubled in the next three years. The usage of the existing facilities provided by the PDP 11/70 which mainly catered for teaching beginner students also multiplied several times over. In four years, total internal storage increased from two megabytes to three and subsequently to four megabytes. This underlined the fact that there were more users as a result of growing computer literacy and that more courses and research are now dependent on the use of computers, as did administrativ e functions previously handled by more traditional mean s of enumeration and collation. A major research project which required a lot of computer support was a Joint Programme between the University and IBM known as the Chinese Herbal Medicin e Information Retrieval System. W i t h the decommission of the ICL mainframe computer in 1982 following th e reorganizatio n of the Universities and Polytechnic Computer Centre (UPCC ), all administrative applications previously handled by the ICL machine were converted to the IBM system. The network which had been established at the University was also serving users from the Hong Kong Examinations Authority and the University of Hong Kong who now relied on the IBM system at the University's Computer Services Centre for their administrative applications. W i t h the staff of the Faculty of Medicine also becoming increasingly interested in computer-assisted research and wi th growing demands from various teaching departments for computer-aided instruction, the need for computer time and facilities is expected to grow in geometric proportions and the Computer Services Centre which had coped remarkably well wi th all this expansion under the new Director, Dr. Stanislaus Hu, wi l l need to maintain the continual expansion in computing capacity. The Centre operates 24 hours a day with staff working on three shifts to serve the needs of the faculty, students, and university administration. D. Universit y Librar y Syste m After the reorganization of the University Library System i n 1977 ， Library operations were streamlined and rationalized and impressive progress was made not only in the acquisition of books and periodicals but also in rendering to the University community 37