Yale University's 12 residential colleges will be connected during the next two summers to the ethernet, providing their students with faster and easier access via their computers to a wealth of information they can use and enjoy, President Richard C. Levin has announced.
Branford, Calhoun, Jonathan Edwards, Saybrook, Ezra Stiles and Trumbull Colleges are scheduled for ethernet connection this summer, while the other six colleges will be linked to the ethernet during the summer of 1996. Since the Old Campus, the Hall of Graduate Studies and Helen Hadley Hall received ethernet connections in 1994, the 1996 work will be the third and final phase of the project to give students an ethernet link in their campus homes.
"We want Yale's students to have a wide window on the world from their residences,"President Levin said. "We are making substantial progress toward that goal, and we will take another major stride this summer. By the fall of 1996, students who live on campus will have extraordinary access - right where they live - to information they want and need to know."
The plan to connect student residences to the University's high-speed data and telecommunications network is part of a larger project to provide fully supported network connections for voice and high-speed data to the entire campus, including classrooms, laboratories, public computer clusters, libraries, museums, performance halls, student residences, and faculty and staff offices. Fiber optic or coaxial cable has been extended already to most of the major academic and research buildings on campus, and all of the public computer facilities that are available to students and faculty for research, teaching, or personal use have been connected to the ethernet network.
Information services available on the network today include the Library catalog (Orbis), the Nexis information service, and a host of other citation and bibliographic databases. Expanding instructional use of the network includes animated graphics and image data delivered over the network for biology, visualization tools in math, engineering and the sciences, and access to full text and image materials from the Yale Library and other University collections.
Network services nationwide and at Yale are exploding with a huge variety of text, image and multimedia services typified by World Wide Web sites such as the French government's site with pictures of the recently discovered prehistoric cave paintings, the U.S. government's legislative Web site, Thomas, which includes full text of congressional legislation among its many offerings, and a large number of Yale department pages, faculty research pages and student pages.
In addition to providing improved access to these and other materials, the new ethernet services will allow the network to support the increasing number of students connecting, said Philip Long, director of Academic Computing Services, who noted that requests for network connections have increased from about 450 two years ago to approximately 1,400 this academic year. Mr. Long, who said he expects network connections to continue to grow, noted that students using DOS and Windows operating systems will find it easier to plug into ethernet than tto the existing Appletalk network, which remains available.
For students, one active ethernet jack will be installed in residential college suites, with students being able to connect multiple machines to the single jack. The student network fee will remain $90 per machine for the academic year, which is the cost of connecting to the Appletalk network. For an additional $30 installation charge, students in colleges that have been renovated (Calhoun, Jonathan Edwards, Ezra Stiles and most of the Old Campus) can have a jack activated in their bedrooms as well.