The Eppley Adminstration Building (1956 – present)

The Epply Administration building, located snugly between Roskens Hall and the Milo Bail Student Center, hasn’t always been home to UNO’s top administrative staff. For almost 20 years the red brick building used to be the campus library before the Criss Library was built in the 1970s.

The planning stages of the new library began in 1949 after the Sapp Fieldhouse had just finished construction. The previous library was located in the northeast building of the Arts and Sciences building and severely lacked space for the needs of both the libraraians and the students. After going through several years of committee meetings, the $850,000 project broke ground in June of 1954 where, previously, tennis courts had been located.

Built with a main entrance facing Dodge Street, the library would include a first floor dedicated to rooms for conferences, audio-visual presentations and lectures. The second floor would maintain all of the library’s books and documents, which at the time totaled 50,000 volumes. Money for preliminary costs like architectural designs and land surveyors had come from Eugene Eppley, owner of the Eppley Hotel Company and, specifically, Hotel Fontenelle with the university covering the remaining cost of construction but, in 1955, Eppley decided to cover the entire cost of the library project and, as such, would bear his name from that point onward. The $850,000 donation was the largest donation ever made to the university at that point.

The library opened its doors in January of 1956 to rave reviews from staff that called the building “awe-inspiring” and “beautiful” while students complemented the building as “so beautiful” that she couldn’t stay away. Meanwhile books continued to be donated and purchased by the university with room for up to 250,000 volumes; over five times the space in the original Arts and Sciences location but a far cry from the current number of 700,000-plus in the Criss Library.

Foot traffic also increased rapidly, with one Gateway article saying that the numbers had tripled from what it was in the early 1950s in the Arts and Sciences building to what it was in 1959 in the Gene Eppley Library.

By 1963 the building was in need of expansion and, late in the year, two new wings were added to the building’s current structure. By this time the construction was completed, the library had moved from 50,000 books in 1952 to 145,000 books; a huge increase that matched a similarly large boom in students – over 8100 in 1963, a 400-student jump from the previous year.

However, the expansion couldn’t stave off a need for a new facility. In 1970, talk began to build of a new structure to hold the campus’ expanding student population, which was anticipated to reach 15,000 by 1973 and 20,000 by 1980 (the highest enrollment UNO has ever had is 16,227 in 1993). In 1974 a completion date on what would become the Criss Library was set at 1976 and by ’76, the library had moved into its new home.

Meanwhile, the Eppley Building became a transitional home for UNO’s administrators with registration and admissions offices moving in to the building as books were being moved out. A $2 million request over the next two years was made to renovate the building; however, it wasn’t until 1981 that the necessary renovations were completed. When all was said and done in the building, it became the home for offices of Campus Security, Institutional Research, University Relations, Veteran’s Affairs and the Chancellor, just to name a few.

Minor renovations have gone on in the Eppley Administration Building since 1981, with offices being moved around and refurnished, but not a lot has changed in 30 years. Most recently, a department devoted entirely to parking was split off from Campus Security and given it’s own space between Cashiering and the Registrar on the southeast side of the building.

While it’s a building that not a lot of students get a chance to walk around in as much as say, the Arts and Sciences building or the Criss Library, the role it has played, and still plays, on campus is an important one. For almost 60 years, the Eppley Administration Building has stood as not only a multi-function facility but as a testament to the tangible effects of generosity and philanthropy.

UNO Organizations: Secular Student Alliance

Religion and spirituality are often contentious topics with room for debate and disagreement. However, it is the understanding that can be found within those debates and disagreements that UNO’s Secular Student Alliance strives for.

With an organizational mission to promote humanistic values, the Secular Student Alliance has worked with students, faculty and other organizations around campus to promote human understanding at its most basic and stripped-down levels.

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The UNO Child Care Center (1986 – present)

Approaching its 25th-year anniversary this year, the UNO Child Care Center is a campus mainstay that almost never happened.

The first steps of getting child care facility occurred in 1977 when a $62,000 grant was awarded for just such a purpose. However, instead of having the center on campus, it was contracted out to the First Christian Church across the street.  Opened in June, the center was used at first used by just seven children of students, faculty and staff but many more joined and, by October, was filled to capacity.

Even at capacity, demand for use of the center was still high and plans were underway to have a larger, more centralized center on campus.

Initially slated to open in 1982, plans for a child care facility became mired in red tape and viability studies. Vice Chancellor Richard Hoover said that he hadn’t “yet seen evidence of demand” while proponents of the plan said that the demand for an on-campus facility was obvious; so much so that the student senate allocated $300 simply to advertise that need across campus.

Whether because of the advertising or in spite of it, there was a 90-percent response rate on surveys sent out by the Women’s Resource Center to gauge interest in the facility. An official “Child Care Committee” was formed in early 1982 and gave the go-ahead to begin moving forward. In the meantime, the Student Senate continued to put money forward for a child care center, voting to increase student fees by $1.50 to help fund the proposed center, raising $10,000 by the start of the 1984-1985 school year in addition to $20,000 already set aside.

By mid-1985 $50,000 had been raised and plans finally began to move forward after a purchase of homes on the west end of campus. By the beginning of 1986 a location had been chosen – Annex 47 – and a final estimate of just under $75,000 was given to renovate the house and bring it up to code.

On August 25, 1986 the UNO Child Care Center (UNOCCC) officially opened as the only on-campus child care facility in Nebraska under the direction of Joyce Kinney. The center could enroll up to 63 students (aged 18 months to six years) and contained areas for arts and crafts; quiet play; and building blocks among other spaces – including a jungle-gym structure which was still being planned. Eight staff members worked alongside Kinney to provide supervision and education.

Initially scheduled for just the fall and spring semesters, it was only a year later that the UNOCCC added a summer education program for children as old as 12 years old. As of that fall, over 105 children were enrolled in the program; however, not all of them were in the building at the same time. Over 75 percent of the children in the center were the children of students with the remaining 25 percent being made up of the children of faculty and staff. Meanwhile, the staff was also partially made up of students, with many education majors working at the facility.

The Child Care Center reached a milestone, and another first for the state, three years after its creation when, in 1990, it received national accreditation from the National Association for the Education of Young Children. That same year it received $7000 from the Student Senate to expand its facilities into the building’s garage and Omaha’s other University of Nebraska campus, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, began its own plans for a child care center.

In 1991, Kinney left her position at the UNOCCC and her assistant, Ellen Freeman-Wakefield, took over and ran the child care center for another six years, until 1997 when she left after serving the center almost all of its 11-year existence to that point. She was replaced by then-assistant director Dawn Hurlburt (now Dawn Hove) who had worked at the UNOCCC since 1993 and continues to run the facility as its longest-serving director at 14 years. However, she is not the longest-serving staff member; that honor goes to Effie Swinarksi, who has worked there since 1987.

Today, the UNOCCC retains many of the elements from its origins 25 years ago.

The renovations to Annex 47 maintained much of the house’s original design and one can quickly deduce where the living room (multipurpose area), bedrooms (toddler rooms) and garage (transition room) once were.

While equipment has changed (a wooden jungle gym in 1988 was replaced by an all-plastic model in 2000 and the knee-scrape-inducing concrete driveway was covered in plastic tire molding), the purpose of the center, to educate the university’s youngest students, remains in tact and as strong as ever.

Sajda Qureshi: Looking Forward to a ‘Cloudy’ Day

Learning how to use technology is a vital aspect in succeeding today both individually and as collectively. While we all expect major corporations and institutions like UNO to be as up to date as possible with their technology, this task is not so easy for small businesses with only one to four employees on the pay roll. However, that doesn’t make the need to learn how to use technology any less important.

Time and money are both key components to whether or not an organization can embrace technology in its day-to-day operations, but what about issues like accessibility or technological literacy? After all, what’s the use of upgrading your technology equipment if you don’t know how to use it? Or know how it will affect your business?

Enter Dr. Sajda Qureshi, a professor of Information Systems College of Information Science and Technology at the Peter Kiewit Institute, and her team of researcher-students, who, for the past five years, have been taking their skills and providing “IT counseling” to local microenterprises, as part of the “Information Technology for Development” program, in order to make sure they are some of the few that ultimately succeed.

Qureshi’s research deals with assessing the ability of businesses to adapt new technology and her courses have followed in the same path, looking to mix philanthropy and technology.

One of the big steps in technological development that makes up her work is called cloud computing. Cloud computing is the idea that files and information can exist at one stable point on the Internet with the ability to be accessed from anywhere.

In her research, Qureshi uses the cloud computing approach to host programs like Powerpoint, Dreamweaver, Photoshop and other applications that are developed on her project to support micro-enterprises. These applications can be accessed by the microenterprises from laptops carried around by her students, which are then brought to and used by the microenterprises for one-on-one program training.

But it’s not just a one-way street. Qureshi uses diagnostic tools, which help determine what needs a business has, to collect and analyze large pools of data via the laptops and cloud-computing server. As she explains, not only do the students help these microenterprises learn practical and beneficial skills, but also the information about their needs and barriers to knowledge can be used to better prepare other students and other businesses into the future.

“In the end, the students have better knowledge of not only those challenges, but also skills – they develop skills that make them particularly competitive, not only in our economy but the global economy,” Qureshi says. “The tech sector really appreciates students like this.”

Qureshi and other faculty members on campus have worked together to research and publish their findings over the last decade. Her research has also earned campus-wide recognition, being selected as the recipient of the “Outstanding Faculty Service-Learning Award” for 2011 along with Dr. Peter Wolcott.

To date, the IT for Development program has resulted in two published journal articles, seven journal editorials, 14 conference presentations and eight book chapters, in addition to serving as the basis for three PhD dissertations and four theses.

The project has also garnered attention from companies like Google and Microsoft.

Ultimately, Qureshi says that it is microenterprises like the ones assisted by the program that provide the backbone to our economy.

“The challenges are that challenge can be overcome, which is a pretty large one, then these businesses can survive,” she says.

The more of these companies that can find economical stability, she adds, the better of we will be economically as a nation.

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UNO Course Profiles: Synergy Project

Have you ever wanted your courses to work together a bit more?

How about all of your courses working together seamlessly?

That’s the goal of Dr. Matthew Marx from the UNO Department of English. Over the past couple of years he and other faculty members, including Dr. Laura Grams from the Department of Philosophy, to construct courses that are team-taught and, in a word, synced together so that assignments are more focused and teaching can be more in-depth.

The results, Marx says, speak for themselves.

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UNO Organizations: National Student Speech Language Hearing Association

There are millions of people in the world who walk around with some sort of disability in hearing or language. The National Student Speech Language Hearing Association, established within the UNO College of Education, looks to not only make others more aware of this issue, but help those who experience these types of issues aware that they are really no different than anyone else.

In this video, co-presidents Jennie Flaxbeard and CJ Podany explain what NSSLHA is and how to get involved.

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UNO Course Profiles: Philanthropy and Democracy

Everybody knows what philanthropy is… or do they? In Dr. Angie Eikenberry’s special Philanthropy and Democracy course – an Honors Program colloquium – she and Sara Woods, Associate Dean for the College of Public Affairs and Community Service, work with students to help them understand the philanthropic process. The two also help guide the students to make their own choices about philanthropy, fostering a democratic dialogue in which students can not only learn about what they care about but in what ways they can help their communities.

* Since the recording of this video, the $10,000 donation given to the students to use as they see fit has been increased to $20,000 thanks to a charitable donation from Doris Buffett *

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Robin Gandhi: Hacking the Hacktivists

Anonymous.

Most recognize the word as the catch-all name for poems, short-stories and even novels with no author. Dr. Robin Gandhi, however, is more familiar with the word as the pseudonym for a collection of computer hackers who have become famous for their recent acts of cyberterrorism. Just some of Anonymous’ targets in the last few years have been the Church of Scientology, Support Online Hip Hop, the No Cussing Club, and most recently HBGary, an internet security firm that was hired by the government to investigate Anonymous.

Gandhi, and his research teams (KEWI – Knowledge Engineering [KE] techniques to Web Intelligence [WI]), have been working over the past several years to help warn potential targets that they might be attacked by groups, or individuals, like Anonymous. As Ghandi explains it, it’s the same as a weather reporter warning you of a thunderstorm so you can be sure to bring an umbrella.

This is achieved through a program called CyCast, short for Cyberattack Forecast, which uses data-mining and quantitative analysis techniques to determine what elements would predict a high risk for a cyber attack and where the attack might occur. According to the CyCast website, the system is “intended to monitor the Social, Political, Economical, and Cultural (SPEC) factors worldwide, analyze the related cyberattacks that occur, evaluate the patterns of the attack and build a security model to assess the likelihood of similar attacks that may occur in the future.”

As Gandhi explains, due to the largely conversational nature of the internet, it is far more likely for groups to form together or for individuals to enlist assistance in order to launch attacks on organizations. By identifying particular words used and particular parings of words found in social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and online message boards, as well as the volume of these words or word parings, a predictive model can be created to help warn organizations of these threats.

While this program is still in its initial stages, Gandhi is confident, with the limited success they’ve already had in loosely predicting certain attacks, that the program will only improve and become more accurate. Additionally, the program has proved immensely beneficial to the student researchers working under Gandhi’s supervision with multiple papers, conferences and grants provided to the project.

In a world where technology, and terrorism, are becoming more advanced by the day, the work being done by Gandhi is not only timely, but also practical.

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UNO Organizations: Sigma Phi Epsilon

Universities and Greek Organizations have gone hand-in-hand for centuries. However, most people’s view of what campus fraternities and sororities have to offer is often misinformed by negative depictions in movies and television.

It is this image that Bret Harrell, president of Sigma Phi Epsilon, wants to dispel.

Harrell says that Greek life, at least at UNO, is not about hazing and crazy parties – instead, it’s all about friendships, community service and networking with community members who may be able to provide job opportunities once you graduate.

All of these reasons and more are why, Harrell says, everyone should consider going Greek.

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UNO’s Libraries: A History  (1912 – present)

According to the Criss Library website the beginnings of UNO’s library services began under circumstances that weren’t exactly optimal. It took four years after the University of Omaha was founded in 1908 to begin collecting materials to form a library; but it was housed in Joslyn Hall at 24th and Pratt when UNO was without a campus to call its own.

In 1938, the Municipal University of Omaha moved to its current location and built a base of operations in what is now the Arts and Sciences Building on the far-east end of campus. At that time, the library was housed on the second floor but it didn’t take long for students to grow tired of the cramped spacing.

Joslyn Hall Library (1924)

In 1954, construction was started on the Gene Eppley Library (now the Gene Eppley Administration Building) to the north of the University of Omaha main building. It was named after Eugene C. Eppley, a local philanthropist who donated the entire $850,000 needed to build the structure.

Gene Eppley Library (1955)

The Eppley Library would fulfill the studying and research needs of the campus until the 1970s when, after being absorbed into the University of Nebraska system in 1968, the facility was too small to properly accommodate students. According to a 1974 Gateway article, at the time ground broke on the construction of a new building, the Eppley Library could only service seven-to-eight percent of the student body.

In June 1974 construction began on a new library located several blocks west to the Criss Library’s current location. With the construction of a new library, the available volume for books and other documents increased by one third, seating for students doubled, and new rooms for things like typing stations and vending machines were put in. At a total cost of $5.1 million, the library was scheduled to be completed in a year-and-a-half — January 1976.

Several setbacks ultimately changed this date. The first was the 1975 tornado  that touched down in southwest Omaha and made its way northeast, eventually cutting a swath through 72nd Street from Center Street to Maple Street in Benson. While the university was not directly struck by the tornado, high winds and rain caused delays in the construction process.

Secondly, according to the Gateway, in June of 1975 the steel workers, painters and roofers who were working on several UNO projects stopped work. While the crisis was eventually resolved, it set back the deadline for completion to summer 1976. A year after the delays, in June 1976, the final touches on the building were completed and the new library – simply called “University Library” – was open to the public.

University Library Construction (1974)

Opinions of the new library ranged from the disgruntled (a Gateway editorial questioned spending money on the project in the first place) to the ecstatic. Over time, however,  despite the loss of several parking lots, students came to use and enjoy the library in large numbers.

Several features made the new library unique, including a large fountain on the north side of the building and a second-floor lounge with a vending machine area. However, it was the library’s orange carpet that had the longest legacy, a fixture in the building from its opening in 1976 to its next major renovation in 2005.

University Library (1990)

A University of Nebraska Board of Regents meeting in 2004 started the ball rolling toward making the Criss Library what it is today. The first step was naming it after Dr. C.C. and Mabel L. Criss, the husband-and-wife team behind Mutual of Omaha. The couple’s memorial foundation supplied much of the money needed to renovate the building while anoher addition was helped paid for, and named after, Dr. Guinter Kahn, a University of Omaha graduate from 1958.

Construction began in June 2005 on the renovation and expansion of the building. The expansion would eventually include another elevator, a new garden meeting area, additional student seating, a small coffee-shop-like café, a larger internet cafe-style seating area, an additional ATM machine, more computer terminals and a glass-awning on the third floor overlooking Dodge Street (the Guinter Kahn Addition). It was dedicated in October of 2006.

Criss Library (2006)

Today, the Criss Library provides students with access to over 700,000 books; 2,300 print and 45,000 electronic subscriptions; 300 research databases; as well as music and video rentals. Throughout the year it is home to several university-wide, and sometimes state-wide, displays including the recent collection of artifacts from former UNO student, and U.S. senator, Chuck Hagel. Additionally individual carousels, group study rooms and communal collaboration spaces are available to rent throughout the school year.

From its origins as a make-shift study site in the 1920s to the state-of-the-art learning center it has become today, the history of UNO’s library is rich and expansive. With the most recent renovations happening less than five years ago the Criss Library will be a long time before any changes are made. However, if the past is any indication, the next step will make things that much bigger and better.