David Cairns

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Slide - 50 Years, 50 Voices - David Cairns - 0:00
Hi, my name is David Cairns. I was a student at the University of Prince
Edward Island starting in 1976 and later in the ‘80s I became a staff
member in what was then called the Computer Centre. The Computer Centre
then became Computer Services and is now called IT Systems and Services,
ITSS, and I retired from ITSS as the Senior Technology Advisor, basically a
prototype for the CIO position, in 2012 and have been happily retired ever
since. I haven’t lost contact with the University entirely or at all
actually. I have been on the board for the UPEI Retirees Association and
I’m also a member of Seniors College, I’m a facilitator, I teach
courses about iPads, home networking, and other technologies. 


Slide - Student Life at UPEI - 1:02
It was very interesting, I had options when I was leaving high school to
either attend UPEI or to go elsewhere and I chose to stay at the University
of Prince Edward Island. My undergraduate degree is actually in biology and
I had the opportunity as a high school student to actually come on campus,
tour around, meet people, like UPEI has always been very open and friendly,
especially with the community. Living in a small space, you can’t help
but know that oh yes, there’s a professor or an administrator or just any
University employee working that works here just down the street from you
or that you know, and I had met quite a few UPEI faculty pre- coming on
campus. One especially, Lowell Sweet, was a neighbor of mine. He’s also
an amateur radio operator and I used to help Lowell with his antennas and
setting up his gear and so on. So the first, first day I was on campus I
was wandering across, heading for the gymnasium to register, and here’s
Lowell Sweet walking across campus. I said, “Oh, Lowell, what is it
you’re taking?” and it was at that point he kind of confided, “I’m
not taking anything. I’m a math professor and actually teaching here.”
So it, it is a true Island thing that we’re all interconnected and
sharing. Life as a student at UPEI was great. The class sizes were fairly
small, of course you know we had some you know 100-level courses where, for
example, everyone in science had to take an introductory physics and
introductory biology. So they were larger, but that was good too, and once
you went up through the years at UPEI I found my classes got, for at least
for me, much more interesting because they were more focused and the class
size reduced, and you really got to work with and know a lot of the
students who were in your year, or plus or minus a year, the faculty was
great and always willing to help out. So it was just a grand experience as
a student here. 


Slide - Radio Stations - 3:17
As part of the registration they had a whole series of student
organizations and events that you could go around and they were recruiting
people to help and so on. One of them was the campus radio station, CIMN,
Campus Information Music and News, and they ran a full AM-style radio
station that was broadcast over the power system in the residences, so any
student living in residence could tune into 700-AM and there we were.
People signed up and did shows, I actually did a couple of radio shows and
I was assistant engineer of the radio station with Kenny Adams. Kenny was
the chief engineer. Good fun, good, good learning experience, great fun,
great way to meet people, and actually, for me, it was a great gateway to
employment because during the summers I worked at different radio stations.
I worked at CHTN, back when it was on 11-90, I worked at CFCY at 630-AM, I
did a few drop-ins at CBC-FM and so on. So it was quite fun and a great way
to do that. In my later years I’d gotten more specific work, into-
following my degree, or, I worked as a summer student one year for Computer
Services doing tutoring and some other things. So yes, it helped a lot.
There were a lot of events on campus centered around, oh I don’t know,
things like CIMN. We would host a dance party for example, or we’d have
various contests and so on. We used to even do sidewalk reports by lowering
a microphone out the window - CIMN was located on the fourth floor in Main
Building - so we lowered a very long microphone cable out the window and
our roving reporter would interview people going across campus s that was
good fun too. 


Slide - Moving Computer Services - 5:26
Way back when, the Computer Centre was located in Robertson Library,
actually not too far from where we’re sitting now. The space - it was
right next to Audio/Visual, and when we heard that there was going to be a
Veterinary College on campus, we knew that we were going to have to grow to
accommodate that, so there was a deal struck with the University that we
and Audio/Visual would get space over in the AVC building and they’d get
some additional library space for their holdings and periodicals. So that
whole move was just fascinating. That happened, oh, probably 1987, so I had
been working here for five or six years, and just the logistics of the
whole move - computing was just starting to blossom at that point. We were
planning to inter-network all of the universities and so on in Canada, so
opportune time to go because not too many data lines or encumbrances there,
but the move took a year to plan to get there. And I can still remember,
with the help of the UPEI Maintenance Department, some of the computer gear
in the back of trucks and on dollies kind of shuffling across campus, and
Jim Hancock, who was the Director at the time, and I were kind of there
with fingers crossed, hoping that everything would work after we’ve
plugged it all back together again in the new facility. 


Slide - IT Milestones - 7:02
UPEI has had many IT milestones that perhaps not a lot of people realize.
Upei.ca is our space on the internet, that’s our domain name. Upei.ca
also happens to be the very first UPEI - sorry, the very first “.ca”
domain registered, and we actually received the reward, an award a few
years back when there became a million “ca” sites. We got a nice plaque
saying we’re one in a million. And UPEI still is, and always has been,
kind of a technological leader. Part of that is our location, our
geography. We were far enough away from some of the providers and
information sources that we had to use a network, whether it was the phone
network earlier, but the computer network, the internet that developed
later, that really allowed us to participate much more fully in research
projects and, well, just general everyday life. We all know today how much
we rely on communications and inter-networking.


Slide - ITSS Connections - 8:13
ITSS is one of the few departments on campus that deals with everybody.
Students are our clients, faculty are our clients, staff are the clients,
and we even have some external users who, you know, are doing research or
whatever, that become our clients too. So, we were pretty well connected in
terms of knowing what was going on in campus and being able to help out. As
a matter of fact, I had fac - I had some of my administrative system
programmers that probably knew as much about registering a student as some
of the people in the Registrar’s Office, just because they had worked
with those systems and data so much. They became very good resources, kind
of knowledgeable users for the departments that were there. I always found
too that, because of the size of the campus and the number of people, there
was a lot of collaboration between departments and one of the things that
we used to do as part of our planning, we’d go around and say, “Okay,
Library, what are your plans in the next little while for using technology
and so on? How can we help?” And then we’d go to another department and
then we’d say, “Oh, did you know that the library’s planning on doing
this? Maybe you want to talk to them and then we’ll do a bigger project
with the two of you.” So, lots and lots of chances and opportunities to
do that within the UPEI system.


Slide - Director to Senior Technology Advisor - 9:39
I was Director at UPEI for about twelve years, and then an opportunity came
about - we looked at trialing a new position. We were thinking the
University could use a Chief Information Officer so we set up a position.
It was ideal for me because at that time I was kind of looking down the
road for retirement and so on, so it allowed me to have a succession plan,
to actually say, “Okay, we need to bring someone in to be the Director,
and oh, by the way, I’ll be on campus to help them with some of the
operational and timing issues.” That’s another thing about
universities, they’re fairly periodic in their workload, like you intake
students in the fall, they go through, they go through an exam period,
they, we have a class graduating in the spring. So there’s some very
periodic activities that you need to be here at least one academic year to
get a good feel for how things are going. So, we were able to do that. I
became the - we call it the Senior Technology Advisor and that freed me up
to do policy and planning work, to sit down for longer chats with people
like Deans, well and the faculty and staff on campus and so on. We also
looked at the time - UPEI developed its own administrative system, and it
was highly customizable, it worked like a dream, it was a great system, but
we only had three administrative programmers so we couldn’t respond to
things like, “Oh, I’m used to using a mouse and I wanna click here and
do that.” It just would have taken us too long to create that system, so
we actually went out to the marketplace following the guidance of some of
our other colleagues at other universities and started looking at systems.
But before we did that, we received some really good advice from our
consultant. They said, “Document what you do,” and then even if you
don’t go ahead with a new administrative system, you’ve got this
wonderful document of how to register a student, how to borrow a book from
the library, and so on, and if you hire new faculty or staff you could say,
“Oh, here’s where you’re going to interact with all of these
functions,” “Oh, you’re a new person advising students in the
Registrar’s Office, here’s the twelve or fifteen processes you need to
know, here are the people that you can get this information from and
that.” So that was a very worthwhile project and I enjoyed that as Senior
Technology Advisor.


Slide - Final Thoughts - 12:13
It is amazing, like, the number of people that I’ve met on campus, the
friendships that I have and maintain, when I think back - I came to the
University when I was seventeen years old as a student. I’m older than
that now. Old enough to be retired. And so I spent a good section of my
adult life here on campus, and it still feels like home. It’s - I can’t
get over that. I walked into the library today for this interview and over
comes Larry Yeo, “Oh Dave, how are you doing?” Leo was there, “Oh,
how are things? What’s going on?” And we still maintain a lot of
contacts and a lot of, a lot of community. Again, the Island’s a small
place. It’s nice to know what’s going on. Not only am I still involved
with UPEI via Senior’s College, I’m also serving on some boards and
some committees. I’m on a group called the Atlantic Internet Exchange
that’s actually looking at interconnecting backup links for some of these
institutions. Of course when you’re retired and people hear it they go,
“Oh, we’ve got a project for you!” So I get lots of things like that
and as well. But I do credit UPEI for a lovely education in a number of
ways. They educated me as a student, they also educated me and allowed me
to become an efficient and effective employee, administrator, and teacher.
So it’s all been wonderful.