College Information Available on Web Servers

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Cruising the Web for College Information

College-bound high school students start getting college brochures the summer before Senior year. Stacks of catalogs arrive, each describing non-discriminatory admission policies and showing photographs of undergrads having good, clean fun. Senior year is spent visiting schools, being shuffled around campuses by tour guides who tell anecdotes about the school's distinguished history and drop names of the famous alumni.

Schools With Web Servers

Well, the good news is that you can now do some of this research via cyberspace. I took a tour of colleges with World Wide Web servers recently, and discovered that academic use of WWW has gone far beyond the availability of papers on high energy physics and encryption algorithms. Many schools are developing Web browsers to make their catalogs available online. You can read about the school's history and campus layout. You can get maps of the campus and surrounding area. On some browsers, you can get photos of academic buildings, libraries, and even the college president.

I found a few colleges and universities that are already fairly far along in putting together slick Web servers:

to Mississippi State University.
to Honolulu Community College.
to the University of Kansas.
to Cranfield Institute of Technology (in the UK).

Many more schools are working on Web servers that aren't as polished yet, but show potential for becoming quite impressive:

to City University in London.
to the "official" Web server at UCLA.
to the "unofficial" Web server at UCLA.
to University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Types of Information Available

While many of these Web browsers are meant for visitors or potential applicants, still more were designed for internal use by students and faculty. Many colleges have servers designed primarily to provide information about on-campus facilities. The most common example of these are Web servers set up for users of a university's computer lab.

But many schools now also provide WWW hooks for information about the campus in general. The type of information you can find ranges from class schedules, to takeout menus from local restaurants, to descriptions of upcoming events on campus. School newspapers and other publications are available on some servers, as well as bus schedules and subway maps.

Schools With Gopher Servers

One caveat is that many university WWW servers consist mainly of links to Gopher servers. Examples of schools with extensive campus information via Gopher are:

to Rutgers University.
to Boston University.
to the University of Pennsylvania.

College Servers With Character

And then there are the schools that take a less structured approach. The "unofficial" Cal Tech server, run by their undergraduate comp-sci lab, is noteworthy in this regard.

to Cal Tech.

They have a lot of the usual campus information available, but where they shine is in using the server as a forum for self-expression, for both students and faculty. (There is a disclaimer denying any official responsibility for the contents of these pages, since much of it may be offensive to some readers.)

You can bring up the "home pages" for several students--in these home pages, you might learn about the student's interests and see a photo of his/her spouse, partner, children, or pet. Several undergraduate student houses also have areas dedicated to telling more about themselves and showing photos from their most recent keg party. Even the maps of the campus have personality--they start with Cal Tech's position on the planet Earth, and zoom in until you see maps of Southern California, Pasadena, the Cal Tech Campus, and finally a low-tech ASCII drawing of the Computer Lab.

On one hand, this sort of free-for-all browser might seem a bit frivolous. But students aren't the only ones who are given free reign to try things out on the Cal Tech Web browser. On the academic end, I found a mechanical engineering course that has the course notes, problem sets, and other class handouts available online. to the course notes for ME 119 at Cal Tech.

This is one step towards the ambitious Globewide Network Academy plan, which intends to have entire classes conducted in cyberspace. to the Academy.

A Small But Growing Phenomenon

Obviously, the online representation of a school can be misleading (about as misleading as its brochure)--but it's a place to start.

Still, most colleges and universities do not have yet have a presence on the Web. The amount of time and effort a school puts into its Web browser is likely to be directly proportional to the size and influence of its computer science department.

As a result, many liberal arts schools (including my own alma mater) have yet to make a mark in cyberspace. However, if current predictions about the anticipated growth of the Web are true, in a few years high school students may routinely use the Web to research colleges. Hmm, how about a virtual reality tour of the campus?

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