The Sungkyun Times

A talk with KT is required.

Kim Min-ji_Reporter

minjily@skku.edu

At the beginning of this year, a number of Plasma Display Panels (PDP) were set up at the lobbies of Dasan Hall of Economics, Toegye Hall of Humanities, the 600 Anniversary Building, Engineering Building, and other on-campus buildings. However, few students know for which purpose these PDPs were set up. Furthermore, with repeating images of advertisements and music videos on the screens, many students have a skeptical point of view about the PDPs on campus.

1) Who set up the PDPs and why?

             To diversify the public relations (PR) of the school, the chief of Information Technology Team at SKKU suggested to the biz-meca team of <KT> to install the commercial PR PDPs on campus. As the result of the conference with <KT>, the infra was constructed in December 2005 and finally a number of PDPs were set up at the beginning of this year.

2) The process so far.

The result of the conference with <KT> is as follows. If <KT> set up the PDPs at SKKU, <KT> owns the PDPs and some of the advertisement profits from the PR will belong to <KT>. As a result <KT> established a total number of 36 PDPs, 14 PDPs at the Humanities and Social Science campus and 22 at the Natural Science campus, each of which cost more than 3,000,000 Won.

3) The current situation and the problems in this project.

             After the installment of the PDPs, SKKU asked <KT> to invest some money in the SKKU development fund out of the profits gained from advertisements on the PDP screens on campus. However, the two sides couldn’t reach an agreement on the demand yet. Due to the disagreement, the process of this project is experiencing some difficulties. Accordingly, the project is progressing slowly in many respects.

Consequently, the Information Technology Team at SKKU first installed the PDPs, while the management of the PDPs is under an employee from the PR department at SKKU until September. In other words, the installment of the equipment is done by the IT team, and it is managed by the PR dept.. With the procrastination problem, the PDPs are only performing their trial function by showing some advertisement sources from SKKU and the company. For this reason, the present images on the screens are insufficient in quality and frankly, useless. “I don’t understand why these PDPs are set up at the lobbies. With curiosity I asked my colleagues, but nobody knew about the purpose of the expensive but useless equipment. Moreover, I think the repeating images on the screens are of no worth,” says Han Dong-hee (a freshmen, in the School of Social Science).

On the other hand, at Yonsei University, the PDPs are used efficiently in the College of Engineering. There are three PDPS in the lobbies of the College. Those are used as PR notice boards to announce events and news of the school. Besides, fifteen universities including Sogang Univ., Korea Univ., Hanyang Univ., Hongik Univ. are also using the PDPs as PR boards managed by the student support team, university newspaper, or university broadcasting with an agreement with <KT>.

According to the chief of the Renovation and Management TF team at SKKU, “If the inner problems are solved well and the conference with <KT> ends after September, we are planning to provide more proficient images with various contents such as PR images, event announcements or updated school news. Furthermore, we are planning to show academic calendars such as the matriculation or graduation information, an introduction of student clubs or popular lectures, and other things on the PDPs.” To achieve these original functions of the equipments on campus, the person in charge of this project should solve the present problems as soon as possible so that the PDPs will work efficiently.