Campus-Wide Information Systems: Managing Information Content Copyright 1993 CAUSE. From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 1993. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: jrudy@CAUSE.colorado.edu CAMPUS-WIDE INFORMATION SYSTEMS: MANAGING INFORMATION CONTENT by Gerald Bernbom It is difficult to pinpoint a precise date, but the first campus-wide information systems (CWISs) began to appear on college and university campuses more than a decade ago. Since that time, CWIS technology has evolved from mainframe/terminal connections and simple text displays to client/server architectures, full-text search engines, network connections to remote information resources, and access to graphic images, video, audio, and other large binary objects. Search and navigation technologies that underlie CWIS implementations have also evolved recently and rapidly with the use of Gopher, WAIS, and World Wide Web; the development of search tools like Archie and veronica; and the emergence of Mosaic clients for Macintosh and Intel computers. But as fast and as far as the technology is carrying us, the reasons for having a CWIS and the opportunities and problems involved in managing one are much the same now as they were ten years ago. At its heart, a CWIS is a local information system intended to present an integrated view of information to the members of a campus community. Typically targeted at a broad audience of students, faculty, and staff, a CWIS integrates * local information with information from remote sources, * scholarly information with information of general interest from the campus or the community, and * academic information with information from administrative departments and institutional databases. The key issue for CWIS management is the management of content: selecting what to include, organizing it, giving each item or selection a meaningful name, keeping the content up to date, and presenting the information in a usable fashion. Managing CWIS content Different institutions have put in place different organizational structures to deal with managing CWIS content. The three groups who can bring knowledge and expertise to the problems of managing content are information technologists, librarians and information specialists, and information providers. These groups face a set of information management challenges that are common to any college or university that undertakes to implement a campus-wide information system. The different technologies that are used to implement the CWIS may set different constraints or offer different opportunities, but the problems are much the same from one CWIS to another. Some of these information management challenges are as follows. Integration and organization of diverse information The ideal of a CWIS is to offer a single point of entry to a wide array of information resources. These range from scholarly information and communications, through administrative and management information, to "casual" (general-interest) information. How this content is organized affects the accessibility of each piece of information and the overall value and usability of the CWIS. The use of menus and hierarchies is the most common method of organizing CWIS content. Even with a relatively small number of information selections, this method of organization depends on well- chosen names for each selection, so that the user can tell what each menu choice offers. As the number of selections grows, the placement of each new information item in the menu hierarchy makes it easier or harder to locate. When menus become nested three and four levels deep, and when the number of selections grows into the hundreds, this method of organization begins to break down. In some CWIS implementations, keywords have been used to aid in the organization of information content. Keywords associate information selections with categories or classes, so that a user can find "all items dealing with FINANCE and POLICY" or "all items dealing with STUDENT and ADVISING." To be useful, keywords cannot be assigned haphazardly. A standard thesaurus of keywords is needed, as is a standard method of assigning the same keywords to related items of information. Both menu hierarchies and keyword assignments rely on a single, integrated view of the entire array of information resources that the CWIS offers. The challenge to IT professionals, librarians, and information providers is to establish a view of information that is meaningful and useful to the local community of the campus. Making this challenge more difficult is the lack of a standard model for the classification and organization of such a diverse range of information resources. Quality of local information The unique contribution of a CWIS, and what distinguishes it from the larger network of Internet resources, is its delivery of local information to the campus. In this regard, a CWIS offers individuals and departments on campus the opportunity to be both author and publisher of their own information resource. Assuring the quality of this local information is one of the challenges of managing CWIS content, especially as individual users and departments take greater responsibility for their own information and its organization. Much of what a CWIS offers is the display of fixed text or the presentation of information from campus databases. This might include announcements of health center services, a campus directory or address book, the library's electronic catalog, inter-library loan requests, lists of electronic discussion groups, and so on. The challenges to information providers include: (1) developing or offering access to the information that is of greatest interest to the campus; (2) structuring the information in a way that is easy to read or search, and (3) keeping the information up to date. The corresponding challenges to information technology professionals and librarians include: (1) developing standards for structure and presentation of text that information providers can follow; (2) offering technology tools or services that simplify the process of electronic text publishing, and (3) building useful interfaces between institutional databases and the CWIS style of information presentation. Support of remote information Although local information is its primary focus, a CWIS also offers the opportunity to integrate local and remote information resources into a single presentation. These remote resources may be library catalogs from other institutions, commercial database services, or selected Internet resources such as anonymous FTP archives, Gopher sites, and so on. Inclusion of remote resources presents a support challenge to the management of a CWIS. While local information providers can be held accountable for the quality and availability of their information, for remote information, especially many of the Internet resources, there is no comparable relationship with the information provider. Moreover, as local and remote resources are integrated in a single presentation, this distinction is not always apparent to CWIS users. The failure of a remote information resource is felt as keenly as is the failure of a local resource. The challenges to IT professionals and librarians who select and organize CWIS content include evaluating the reliability of remote resources as a condition for inclusion in a CWIS, and communicating to users which resources are local and which are remote, as well as communicating, where appropriate, known weaknesses or potential failures of remote information sources. Anonymous vs. authenticated access to information Many CWIS implementations treat their information content somewhat like public bulletin boards which anyone may view. In these implementations, there is no need to know the identity of a user. But as the content of a CWIS is expanded, anonymous access to all its information resources may no longer be acceptable. Inclusion of commercial database services typically entails licensing agreements, which carry restrictions about who may access the service. Many of these restrictions can be accommodated using network filtering mechanisms based on the network address of the user, without requiring individual user authentication. Inclusion of many administrative information resources, such as student advising or grades, places additional restrictions on access and requires some means of authenticating the identity of individual users who request such services. The challenge to the IT professionals and librarians who design and manage a CWIS is to successfully integrate these diverse resources, with their range of restriction requirements, so that the most public information can be accessed most freely while access to the more sensitive information is adequately protected. Collaborating on quality and content Information technologists, librarians, and information providers on campus all have contributions to make to the success of the information resource collection that a CWIS represents. Central to this success is a collaboration among these parties on the problems of selecting, organizing, and presenting the information content of a CWIS. Information technology professionals can offer expertise in computing, networking, and communication technologies. Important to the IT contribution is their recognition that a CWIS is primarily a content-based information service, and not a content-free technology service--that the quality of CWIS technology cannot substitute for the quality of information content. In focusing on the information issues, IT professionals need to apply their experience in information systems design, database design, data administration, and user interface design to the tasks of organizing and presenting CWIS content. Librarians can offer expertise in the selection, organization, retrieval, and presentation of information. They have a rich history of delivering information services to a diverse campus community. Moreover, the libraries are typically one of the major content contributors to a CWIS, in the form of online library catalogues, bibliographic and textual databases, reference services, and other information retrieval services. An important contribution of this group will be the application of their information management skills to the diverse range of information content in a CWIS. Much of this content is non-scholarly in nature, and there are few if any models of organization or classification available to guide this process. Information providers originate much of the local campus content of a CWIS--class listings from the registrar, purchase order information from the purchasing department, a calendar of campus events from the student activities office, and so on. Information providers need to contribute by recognizing their institutional responsibility to provide useful and timely information to the campus community. This means investing the time and effort to develop and collect the information that the campus needs, opening access to information that may previously have been kept closed, keeping information accurate and up to date, and presenting information in a way that is useful and easy to access. What everyone involved needs to bring to the process is a commitment to their CWIS as an information resource of value to the campus and as an important service to their users. ************************************************************************ Glossary of terms Archie--a tool for gathering, indexing, and searching information from around the Internet, specifically the collection of filenames found at anonymous FTP sites. FTP (File Transfer Protocol)--a network service and protocol for the transfer of files from one computer to another. Gopher--a client/distributed-server document search and retrieval protocol developed at the University of Minnesota. Mosaic--a client interface to a wide variety of networked information systems, including World Wide Web, Gopher, WAIS, Archie, etc. veronica--a service that maintains an index of titles of Gopher software that supports search and retrieval of text and multimedia information, especially for building/searching full-text indexes on databases. World Wide Web (WWW)--a distributed hypermedia system; a "browser" program that reads documents, and retrieves documents, images, and files from other sources. ************************************************************************ Acknowledgments Three feature articles in this issue of CAUSE/EFFECT describe three different CWIS implementations. Of interest to me as I prepared this article were * the work at Baylor University to integrate administrative information services into the CWIS environment, and their development of principles for CWIS design; * the work at Dartmouth College involving the collaboration of the central computing organization and the library, and their focus on their CWIS as an actively managed, content-rich information resource; and * the work at University of Texas-Houston Health Science Center which developed a well-defined role for a CWIS "editorial staff" whose responsibilities include support for the information providers and management of the overall look and feel of the CWIS. Also in this issue is a Good Ideas article describing work on Bear Access, the client/server CWIS at Cornell University. My thanks to all of these authors for the ideas in their work that contributed to this Current Issues article. A special thanks, too, to my colleagues at Indiana University whose ideas about information management, and whose experiences in building and operating a successful campus-wide information system, have helped shape my thinking about this subject. ************************************************************************ Gerald Bernbom is Assistant Director, Data Administration and Access, at Indiana University. As part of University Computing Services, his unit is responsible for data administration, database administration, security administration, data dictionary management, campus-wide information systems, and the information center. He is chair of the 1993 CAUSE Editorial Committee. ************************************************************************