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Robin Suits: Office of Public Relations, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, USA
With the growth of the Internet, a global network of online computers developed by the military and academia over the past two decades, human communication is undergoing a paradigm shift of major proportions. America On Line estimates that about 20 million people in the world have access to online communication services on the Internet today. About one million new users "come online" every month. Many observers predict that close to 100 million Americans will have access to the Internet by the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Higher education has jumped on this bandwagon with both feet. The university or college that does not offer some kind of online information system - at the very least, its library catalog - is in a rapidly shrinking minority. The typical comprehensive university has made a very hefty investment in computer networks, data systems and personnel. The majority of faculty, staff and students have access to computer equipment and most recognize that a college graduate who is not comfortable with computers will be at a major disadvantage in the job market.
In the last few years, hundreds of colleges and universities have taken advantage of these opportunities by creating campus-wide information systems (CWISs). A CWIS offers a relatively inexpensive way to provide all members of a university community with access to the huge stores of data that reside on campus and on computers throughout the world. Howard Strauss, manager of advanced applications and developer of Princeton University's CWIS, says Princeton installed its CWIS "because we knew we had to...We saw a CWIS as an essential element in the services we had no choice but to offer. It wasn't a question of if we could afford a CWIS, but whether we could afford to continue to build our expensive computer and network infrastructure without making some benefits of those facilities universally available" ( Strauss, 1992a).
What is a campus-wide information system?
Judy Hallman, CWIS administrator at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, describes a CWIS as "...a new set of tools for providing access to campus information...A CWIS provides campus information of general interest, online, accessible from virtually any workstation on campus that has communications capability....