InfoMagic Standards 1993 July/Disc.iso/inet/isoc/isocnews/issue1_2/020.08a

Text File | 1993-02-08 | 5.8 KB | 95 lines

020.08  Internetworking at Connecticut College
by Thomas C. Makofske*
<[e-mail]> and
Gregg Tehennepe

        After months of anticipation, Connecticut College was connected to
the Internet in January of this year via a 19.2 Kbps line installed by
JvNCnet of Princeton, N.J.  The installation and initial operation of
the connection was made possible with the aid of a NSF grant awarded to
the Office of Computing and Information Services (CIS) in the winter of
1990.
        Connecticut College is a highly selective four year private
liberal arts college in southeastern Connecticut that is somewhat unique
among its peers in that every building on campus is linked by fiber
optic cabling.  Every dormitory room, laboratory, office, classroom and
public meeting space has an information port capable of providing access
to voice, data, and video services.  Conn is the first college of its
kind  to be designated a "Campus of the Future" by AT&T.
        Students receive a wide range of telecommunications services
included as part of their tuition at Conn.  This support includes free
local calling, universal voice mail and access to discounted long
distance calling.   Additionally, students owning their own personal
computer are provided  with a cable, software and a connection to the
campus-wide network free of charge.  Every student, faculty member, and
administrator can gain easy access from their rooms, offices, public
laboratories or homes to the academic computing systems, an automated
library catalog featuring the contents of the Connecticut-Trinity-
Wesleyan Library Consortium and the full services of the Internet and
BITNET.
        Predictably, the first need after providing  access to the
Internet was to provide training in how to utilize this vast resource in
productive, efficient, and enjoyable ways.  In addition to assigning the
responsibility for managing and supporting access to the Internet to a
member of the computing staff, we have asked that two trainers from
NERComP (New England Regional Computing Program) experienced in the use
and navigation of the Internet teach these skills to a group of
librarians and computing information specialists. Selected because of
their frequent contact with many members of the user community, these
people will become instructors responsible for training others on
campus. A course covering Internet access will also be added to the
current CIS curriculum of courses in computing, networking, and software
applications.
         As a member of the CTW Library Consortium,  the college is
represented at the the Coalition for Networked Information Task Force
meetings. We are looking forward to exploring the technologies being
investigated by CNI member institutions, such as top level information
location and management services and the new protocols for facilitating
interoperability among different computing systems on the Internet .  At
Connecticut, several joint projects involving the library and CIS have
recently been initiated. The two departments are working to coordinate
their efforts to provide the community with access to document transfer
services and remote searching of other libraries and scientific
databases, and most importantly, to support collaboration with other
scholars throughout the world.
        Immediate interest has already been shown in the ICON project in
global negotiation from the University of Maryland, access to DIALOG and
EPIC, and publicly available software and texts via FTP.  Both faculty
and administrators have been scrambling to experiment with access to
library catalogs across the Internet in support of their research and
planning. Among students, communication with other institutions via e-
mail, RtalkS and IRC (Internet Relay Chat) are the most popular uses of
the network to date.  E-mail based discussion groups are widely used,
and  a USENET news feed is planned for the near future.
        We have also used our recent connection to the Internet in an
international setting.  Connecticut CollegeUs Center for International
Studies uses the Internet to communicate with some of the many students
who choose to study abroad for a year.  Several members of our faculty
are already in regular communication with colleagues and discussion
groups in many different locations around the world.  Several times a
year the Director of Computing and Information Services travels for
LASPAU, Inc. (Latin American Scholarship Program for American
Universities at Harvard University) to institutions in the Caribbean and
Latin America to conduct seminars covering the ways computers and
networks can enrich scholarly activities and projects.  One of the
features of these seminars involves establishing a modem connection from
the host country to the Connecticut College network in order to
demonstrate resources available to scholars through the network such as
automated library systems, e-mail, file transfer and interactive
Rchatting.S   The demonstrations are invariably one of the highpoints of
the seminars, and as a result of these visits, the Director now
regularly corresponds with former students in Ecuador, Jamaica and the
Dominican Republic who write, for example, with questions concerning
information technologies, requests for bibliographic citations of works
on object oriented programming tools, and information about others who
might be interested in discussing diesel engineering.
        We are now in the process of developing a public campus-wide
information system which will be available as a resource on the
Internet.  We are also looking at developing links with our local
community and particularly with local K-12 schools so that they can
gain access to the rich and varied communication and information
resources on the Internet.

*Academic System Coordinator, Director of Computing and Information
Services