020.08 Internetworking at Connecticut College by Thomas C. Makofske* 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