Students entering the Research Center in the library for the first time this semester may be surprised to find that the large Dell desktops under the computer desks are missing. In their place, brand new Mac minis have been inconspicuously attached to the sides of the 62 desks in the Research Center. This upgrade, according to librarian Kevin Heyman, has been long awaited.

“The Dells had a lot of problems,” Heyman said. “We needed to upgrade the technology.”

The Mac mini is a $600 unit from Apple designed to be ultra-compact and powerful. The total cost to upgrade all 62 computers in the Research Center was about $37,200, paid for by the SHS foundation, according to Heyman. The monitors, keyboards and mice used with the Dell desktops were reused for the Mac minis to reduce costs.

Sophomore Rachel Perera, who used the new computers for a research assignment in her English class, said they were a noticeable improvement.

“We used NoodleBib for our assignment, and the computers were definitely faster,” Perera said. “I think they’re just generally nicer, so it’s a good upgrade.”

The immediate reason for the replacement of the Dells was their problematic performance that made them unreliable, according to Heyman.

“[IT Manager] Ms. Grenier, who secured the funding for the upgrades, had been spending an inordinate amount of time rebuilding and repairing the Dells,” Heyman said.

Heyman said that another underlying reason for the upgrade is the school’s increasing technological demands, and the possibility of incorporating e-books into the school’s resources in the future.

“A lot of what we do is in the cloud,” said Heyman, “so we need the Internet for databases, Noodlebib, and if we go to e-books, which we may be doing soon, we just need more power.”