NYU AND THE WORLD-WIDE WEB

Now You Can Connect with ACF Publications Online

by David Frederickson

[Ed: Links to web pages and/or e-mail addresses which have become inactive since the publication of this article have been enclosed in curly brackets { }. Replacement links have been provided where possible.]

The paperless office may not be any closer this year than last, but certainly more information is being made available online. Increasingly, the avenue for online dissemination is the World-Wide Web.

At many universities, people working with computer documentation have been seeking for years to get it all online. There are good reasons to do so: speed of publication, ease of updating, economy, conservation. There are disadvantages: you can't read online documentation if the computer isn't running, or if you're on the subway or at the beach.

Generally it's agreed that not all print versions of all computer documents will disappear, but probably most should be available online. Virtually all of it is written on computers, of course, and most is edited online; why, then, shouldn't it be published the same way? Online help is nothing new, but usually it's separate from the more discursive instructions that are printed. In the world of scientific computing, virtually all documentation is available online, and in many cases there is no formal print version. Much the same is true for major operating systems. But those audiences are relatively small; for material that has to reach a wider audience, print is often still the mode of choice.

NYU and ACF Go Online

Here at NYU, we've been publishing online versions of more and more of the materials we've been printing for years. The process has accelerated in the past year, and it will continue; at this point about twenty of the most popular ACF publications - including Connect and the full semester schedule of ACF classes and talks - are available through NYU Web. You can reach them from the main ACF Web page {http://www.nyu.edu/acf/} Replacement URL: http://www.nyu.edu/its/, which can in turn be reached from the NYU Web main page through the menu items Facilities and Resources, then Computing Resources), or you can link directly to the publications list at {http://www.nyu.edu/acf/pubs/} Replacement URL: http://www.nyu.edu/its/pubs/ (for more complete instructions, see "Use Netscape or Lynx to View ACF Publications Online"). If you don't have a print version of a set of instructions you need, and don't have time to run one down, having a version online can be a timesaver, if not a lifesaver.

The ACF is not the only part of NYU to make material available online: the Registrar has made course descriptions available; GIGS makes grants a snap to find, if not to win; Admissions can get requests for information from interested Web surfers. Sandy Kaufman's article on page 1 tells of other things to come.

And Connect?

Connect will continue to be printed, and it will also be available online. We send the print version to fulltime members of the faculty and staff, and print extra copies for interested people to pick up in the labs and information centers. But as interest in networking grows, we won't be able to print (or afford) enough extra copies for the larger potential audience, so having it available online becomes more urgent.

And, after a couple of years of putting selections of Connect (and its former incarnation, Academic Computing and Networking at NYU) online trhough NYU CWIS, it is now being made available, almost in its entirety. In some cases, in fact, the online version is better: we can put most illustrations online in color, and we will soon be adding audio and video, where appropriate.

There are several questions that have to be answered as we pursue the goal of online publication.

First of all, there are the questions that have to do with making sure the people we want to serve are in fact served: Who makes up the Connect audience? What kind of equipment do they have? What kind of connections?

There's no one answer; since we try to address the computer-shy as well as the computer-literate, we have to assume that not everyone has powerful computers and high-speed connections. A good portion of our audience will be viewing Connect through a text-only browser such as Lynx (in the NYU Internet account), and another large segment will be using graphical browsers, but through connections or on computers that make large file transfers seem painfully slow. And then there are the avid users with fast connections and powerful computers, who want all the bells and whistles they can get. We can't satisfy the third group if it means losing the other two.

Those using Lynx will see all the text, plus a few extras, such as the notation [image] where an image would show up in Netscape. Sometimes the Lynx user will want to know that an image is offered, but generally the information is useless, and often annoying. It's possible to encode the Web document in a way that will either show nothing in Lynx or describe the image in some way that will help the user decide whether to go to the extra effort of downloading the image file. Sometimes, in our effort to use the graphical capabilities of the Web as much as possible, we will create a clickable button that is an image (I've used many); for the Lynx user, the link has to be provided another way. I've tried to provide the alternatives, but have undoubtedly failed in some cases; if you are looking at the pages and find such lapses, please let me know, at {acf.connect@nyu.edu}! Replacement URL: its.connect@nyu.edu

The size of the graphical files is an issue for the second group; the larger the file, the longer it takes to download it. But what's a tolerable size? That depends on the user, and on how much traffic there is on the network. Again, feedback from users is the only thing that will tell us what we need to know. [ C ]

David Frederickson edited Connect at the time of this article's publication.
{david.frederickson@nyu.edu}

Posted 16 February 1996. Revised 24 May 2004.