	Department of Engineering

University of Cambridge > Engineering Department > Administration

Departmental Room Numbering

The Support Services Committee have approved a uniform room numbering scheme for the Department which allows the general location of a room to be inferred from its number. This has benefits in a number of areas: helping Reception to direct people to rooms; sorting post in the Mail Room; providing a unique room code in the EDDA database; capacity planning documention; ping system location information; etc.

Room numbers are of the form AAF-nn

where	AA	identifies the building or sub-building (see below)
	F	identifies the floor (B, G, M, 1, 2, 3, ...)
	nn	is the local room number (see below for discussion on format)

AA:	BE	the main (East) spine of Baker Building
	BN	Baker North Wing
	BC	Baker Centre Wing
	BS	Baker South Wing
	IE	Inglis Main (East)
	IN	Inglis North
	IS	Inglis South
	EE	Electrical Engineering (aka CAPE)
	WH	Whittle
	SC	Schofield Centrifuge Centre
	MM	Mill Lane (main Div E building)
	MX	17 Mill Lane
	MF	Mill Lane (forecourt building)
	WG	William Gates Building

Comments and issues

The three characters before the '-' define a zone and general signage around the Department should refer to these zones. These do away with the need to have special zones defined for, for example, the "ping system" for computer security. It would be helpful if the fire alarm system zones could also be made to correspond.
All areas (including large labs, lecture theatres, etc and even corridor space) are to have a room number conforming to this scheme. Existing names can separately be associated with room numbers (and the EDDA database could include a table of such mappings).
Floors are labelled as shown above (B, G, M, 1, 2, 3, ...). The scheme might have been clearer if the floor number were always numeric but this presents difficulties in the case of B (Basement) and whilst G (Ground) could become 0, this would then imply M (Mezzanine = Office) becoming 1 and consequent confusing renumbering of other Baker Building floors.
The format of the individual room numbers ('nn' above) is not fixed. Wherever possible it should be a two or three digit number but must be consistent for a given area. This is convenient for sorting lists and implies reasonable maximum zone sizes (see next point). But there is also be a requirement to incorporate other numbering schemes, eg in the Gates Building or elsewhere where the effort of changing existing numbers isn't justified and these can simply be used as the suffix 'nn'.
The allocation of room numbers within the three-digit scheme described in (4) above needs care if it is to cope with possible future developments, eg splitting a large lab area into a number of smaller offices. An option may be to leave some gaps in the numbering so that any renumbering does not have too widespread an effect; but such gaps may themselves be a source of confusion if adjacent rooms do not have contiguous numbers.
It is not proposed that this is attempted as a "big bang" exercise but rather rolled out over a period and making use of already planned refurbishment wherever possible. For this reason, it is important that this scheme is defined reasonably soon and in place before the widespread post-CAPE refurbishment starts. Whilst not "big bang" overall, it probably is desirable that the process is done at least a zone at a time so there is not parallel running of different schemes in the same area.

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