Willingness to cooperate is a rare and special attribute. I once asked a
chemist why a supercomputing facility founded to support computational
chemists in the 1980s had failed. He responded by asking me, "Have you
ever tried to cooperate with a chemist?" More recently, a member of the
library community stated that "cooperation among librarians is an
unnatural act" (though he went on to observe that, characteristic of
such acts, it could be bought). But cooperation is possible, and
colleges and universities have played a leadership role in building the
international networking infrastructure because higher education people
involved with computing and their institutions have been willing to
cooperate for their mutual benefit. CREN (the Corporation for Research
and Educational Networking), with more than 500 higher educational
institutions in the United States as members and with cooperative
relationships with more than 1,400 institutions worldwide, is working on
a number of projects designed to harness this spirit of cooperation to
develop a set of new services built on IP connectivity and the Internet.
These new projects are in many ways the logical successors to services
built on BITNET and its underlying goals and philosophy. BITNET was
built through the cooperative efforts of people at more than a thousand
institutions around the globe in support of two important goals: to
connect every scholar in the world to every other scholar through
ubiquitous low-cost connectivity and to provide a set of basic services
in support of scholarship. Those basic services were to include mail,
messaging, file transfer, and a network of List Managers supporting the
distribution of scholarly materials. It was in fact BITNET that proved
the value of networking in higher education and that helped motivate the
development of the Internet.
A major new project is called BITNET III. For those who have forgotten,
BITNET I is built on leased lines connecting institutions hierarchically
and a store-and-forward protocol called RSCS. BITNET II enables BITNET
traffic to flow over the Internet by encapsulating RSCS files in IP
packets. The goal of BITNET III is to build a global dial-up networking
infrastructure that will enable alumni, students, and traveling faculty
and staff to connect to their home institution with full IP
functionality at low cost from wherever they are through a local
telephone call. This initiative facilitates educational outreach by
higher education in support of both distance education and lifelong
learning. It extends the reach of higher educational services and
offers the benefits of networking to the institution's extended family.
The service will be built on network access servers (servers supporting
terminal emulation, SLIP, and PPP) and telephone lines provided by CREN
housed in CREN member institutions and connected to the Internet through
their campus local area network. Phone numbers supporting this service
will be listed under BITNET ACCESS so that travelers, wherever they are,
can easily find the number in the local telephone directory. Phase I
will offer service in fifty cities in North America followed by
subsequent phases, each putting servers in an additional fifty cities.
The goal is that this service will at very low cost provide connectivity
everywhere in North America and, through cooperation with international
BITNET members, in many places in the world. The underlying notion is
that through cooperation by other institutions, an institution will be
able to reach its remote affiliated persons. In return, if asked to host
a server, an institution can help local people affiliated with a remote
institution to connect to that institution.
BITNET III technology is being developed by Merit at the University of
Michigan, Cornell University, Princeton University, and the CREN staff
in Washington, D.C. The technology will enable an institution to
authenticate a remote dial-in patron and control the services to which
the patron will have access. It will also provide accounting.
A few institutions have begun to provide access to the Internet for
their alumni through a local dial-up service for a small annual fee.
They report that this service is enormously popular and rapidly growing.
An increasing number of institutions are also providing distance
education for students who are unable to attend conventional classes at
an institution. Some institutions have indicated an interest in using
BITNET III to furnish information to students applying for admission,
others to reach their alumni development and support offices in remote
cities.
Some institutions, such as Cornell, envision that all students who
graduate shall carry away a lifelong ID that will enable them to
continue to communicate with their college friends and faculty and to
reach campus services. We believe that BITNET III will be a major step
on the road to creating a Virtual University with a growing array of
services.
A second major CREN project is to sustain and extend the capabilities of
the network of List Managers that was pioneered by the LISTSERV network.
(LISTSERV is now marketed by L-Soft International.) CREN has acquired a
UNIX TCP/IP List Manager upon which it plans to build capabilities
enabling the exchange of documents in multimedia formats. One of the
capabilities under development is a distribute function that will reduce
the bandwidth required to send documents to multiple people at the same
institution. When people begin to exchange documents containing images,
this capability will be essential. A range of other information
services are being planned built on a network of communicating servers.
A third project has as its goal allowing institutions to support local
and remote network users with a plug-and-play software suite supporting
major functions that is easy to install, use, and maintain and is
inexpensive to acquire. Implementations that are supported in a
Macintosh OS and DOS Windows environment and that support mail and
network information resource access clients such as Gopher and NetNews
are being explored. This project is designed to support the BITNET III
initiative by providing software supporting network access to
institutional resources and services.
Higher education is facing an increasingly tough world on many fronts.
Our Internet connectivity and our willingness to cooperate are largely
unexploited resources. Examples of big payoffs in cooperation include
using the network to access shared library materials, shared seminars,
and colloquiums and to support nontraditional students through
courseware that is jointly developed. Building the technology and the
relationships that will result in those big payoffs is an enterprise to
which we all can contribute.
Kenneth M. King is executive director of The Corporation for Research
and Educational Networking. [email protected]