Information Access at Cornell University

Name: Graham Hall

Institution: Cornell University

E-mail Address: gah2@cornell.edu

Title of Presentation: Information Access at Cornell University

Format: Conference Workshop

Suggested Audience: Campus support staff involved with distributed computing, registrars, anyone interested in proving institutional data to their end user population

Presentation Outcome:

1. Understand some of the support issues involving distributed computing

2. Understand how Cornell has used Mandarin Technology to create special purpose information services and how their institution can replicate this

Presentation Content:

Strong collaboration between the central information technology organization and university departments is the foundation of the success of distributed computing at Cornell. This presentation will demonstrate some of the services developed at Cornell such as Just The Facts which provides student's with their grades and allows them to enroll for courses on-line and Employee Essentials which provides employees with information about their benefits. It will also discuss some of the support implications of distributed computing and discuss how we have achieved a high level of collaboration between a diverse set of organizations. The client-server software was developed with tools from the Mandarin Consortium - a consortium of 25 higher education institutions of which Cornell is the founding member. Educational institutions can join the consortium to obtain access to the infrastructure and tools used to build client-server information access software.