Letting your fingers do the walking

Floor plans on the 'Net allow instant, easy access

by Jon Stemmle

he days of wandering around campus searching for particular buildings or rooms are over.

MU's buildings, complete with floor plans detailing rooms down to square inches in a corner, are mapped and on-line on the Internet. The "MU Floor Plan" web site (www.cf.missouri.edu/space2/spmap.htm) allows individuals to find any room on campus, with just a computer, the Internet and a few clicks of a mouse.

"Staff can direct students to this site if they want to know how to get to their office," said Scott Shader, manager of Space Planning & Management (SPAM). "The floor plan has information on gross square footage by floor, the room number and use, the architectural layout of the floor, where the main entrance is and even the stairwell."

Floor plans have a variety of uses. Parents, for example, can locate their son or daughter's residence hall room or apartment and architectural and engineering firms can utilize floor plans to facilitate their campus projects and construction.

Scott Shader, manager of Space Planning & Management, instructs Bob Grant, contract document coordinator for the Dean of Agriculture, on how to install the "Whip!" viewer plug-in, an essential ingredient to view MU floor plans online.

Positioning the floor plans on-line was done as a response to the many requests for floor plans by the campus community.

"People were looking for an alternative to the mountain of papers involved with the floor plans for a building," Shader said. "They asked if we could put those drawings online for easy access. We saw it as an opportunity to make our services more accessable — and followed through with it."

Putting the floor plans on-line capped a three-year project to computerize the architectural drawings and renderings of more than 15 million square feet of building-space owned or leased by MU. Every 18 months, SPAM staff begin, anew, travel about the state, surveying the sites and updating information.

"It takes some time to cover the entire state," said Shader. "We're constantly surveying to verify the accuracy of the drawings."

In schematizing MU's building space, Shader divided the campus into four quadrants: the Central MU Campus; East Campus, Athletics and Facilities; and Athletics and Research Park. Floor plans for the Central MU Campus (e.g., Jesse Hall, Sociology Building), and the East Campus (e.g.,Veterinary Medicine, Clydesdale Hall) are now on-line. Presently going on-line are buildings in the Athletics and Research Park (e.g., Epple Field), and the Athletics and Facilities area (e.g., Hearnes Center).

Brenda Clutter, a drafting technician in SPAM, searches through a mountain of binders for a floor plan, a process soon to be obsolete.

"We expect to save a lot of paper and staff time that go into generating these drawings," says Shader. "To fulfill requests from the campus community and print these drawings took away from my staff's time. Now we can put that time toward other endeavors."

To access the floor plans, users must download from the Web a plug-in called "Whip!" designed to view computer-aided drafting and design (CADD) work. "Whip!" allows work computerized by AutoCAD to be two-dimensionally manipulated and can zoom in and enlarge, pan and print CADD material from the computer. Although "Whip!" does not work with Apple computers, CF is currently searching for a plug-in to remedy this problem.

While the floor plans of three-quarters of all campus buildings are shown in detail on-line, certain facilities are not available and must be requested directly from SPAM.

Some 4,000 floor plans for buildings on and off campus — such as some Agriculture Experiment Stations, Middlebush Farm, and Sinclair Farm — should be on-line by early 1999.