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Hi Anne, Not some much as an answer to your question but two broad questions we try to answer when introducing new digital equipment in to art and design teaching and research. Centralisation or Dispersal Do you place all the equipment in a dedicated lab or 'farm' out the equipment to integrate with existing facilities? The former has the benefits of being easier to technically manage, easier to maintain security and can be used for 'class' teaching. The later allows an immediacy between the analogue equipment (e.g. print making facility, chemical based photography etc), studio (e.g. a performance space etc) and the digital equipment. At Sheffield we have settled in the middle, having six specialist clusters, each physically located near existing facilities and serving different needs. We also have two labs for 'class' teaching. Network or not? Is each machine standalone, networked within a room or networked to the rest of the university? Standalone machine's can easily be moved to where they are wanted, they can easily be 'plugged' into existing facilities (e.g. an analogue video editing suite). Standalone machines are often not subject to the controlling hand of 'technical services', people who rarely seem to understand the requirements of 'creative' computing. A networked room allows common output devices (e.g. serveral printers) to be shared between computers with the added benefit of creating a peer to peer learning environment. Networking to the main university allows software metering, reducing the cost of software upgrades. Using the centralised network gives us access to facilities such as live media streaming. We use all three. Currently we are carrying out a research project to see if we can set up a very high speed wireless networking system. If successful we will be able to integrate, relocate and reconfigure any machine whilst maintaining software metering, integration with in and output devices and connection to the wider world. The research is due for completion by the end of the year; details of the research outcomes will be available on our commercial partner's [Fretwell Downing] website: http://www.fdgroup.com/ I hope this helps, Mark Purcell Lecturer in Digital Media Art and Design Research Centre Sheffield Hallam University UK