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JHUniverse: Info system finds home in Garland
Hall February 22, 1994 Sometime later this week, JHUniverse -- the computer network information retrieval system that serves Hopkins faculty, staff and students as a gateway to the Internet -- now has a home all its own in the basement of Garland Hall. System users should hardly notice the difference. "We are transferring Gopher, the software program that runs JHUniverse, from our UNIX computer to its own server that will do nothing but run JHUniverse," said Lee Watkins, assistant director of academic computing at Homewood. "Users might notice that the system will run a little faster and will have less information flash on the screen during the log on process, but other than that, everything will stay the same." Now in its third week of operation, JHUniverse is being widely used, Watkins said, particularly among students. "We have received positive reaction from students and are finding that student groups are moving fast to bring information online," he said. He noted that some faculty members have complained that the system does not offer them enough of the kinds of information they find useful in doing research. "We have had complaints that the really powerful research tools are buried within the system - - that to get to them you have to go through Welch or Computational Biology and so forth," Watkins said. "We'll be working on improving that situation in the near future by collecting a set of resources and linking them in at a higher level." One important JHUniverse function which failed its first test was the emergency notices section, intended to notify the public of closures or delayed openings. On Feb. 9, all campuses delayed opening until noon due to icy conditions. JHUniverse did not post the delay, however, causing at least one unhappy user to post a notice in the system suggesting that Hopkins' experiment in electronic communication was a flop. "Bad weather got to us before we were ready for bad weather," said JHUniverse system manager Laura O'Callaghan. "In the future we will try to make sure closures or delays are posted at the same time public radio stations are notified of the change." She noted that the subsequent cancellation of evening classes on the same day, and the cancellation of classes on Friday, Feb. 11, were posted electronically almost immediately after the decisions were made. "We know there are still some troubles with the system, and we hope our users will bear with us," O'Callaghan said. "Creating JHUniverse is an experimental process. Like any experiment, there are bound to be some mistakes along the way." JHUniverse users can call O'Callaghan at 410-516-8514 or contact her via email at LOC@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu.
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