Acad Computing Steering Com. May 6, 2003

The Committee welcomes back Charles Batson and Fuat Sener from their leaves; Cherrice Traver remains on leave. Felmon and Charles can decide which one or two of them are on the committee. They are both welcome, especially to virtual meetings.

1. RIAA suit. The recording industry continues to battle file-sharing on college campuses. Recently four students were sued by the RIAA for copyright violations. Two of the students were from RPI. The suits were settled on May 1, 2003. Click here for the Chronicle of Higher Education article on the suit.

MUSIC INDUSTRY EXPLORES FIGHTING PIRACY WITH MALICIOUS SOFTWARE

Record companies are investigating a number of technological countermeasures to music piracy, some of which may never be used because they are illegal themselves. Record companies have already deployed "spoof" files--files that masquerade as music files but don't do anything when downloaded--onto peer-to-peer networks, but they have not had much impact on piracy. New tactics include so-called Trojan horse files, which simply redirect file traders to sites where they can purchase music, and "freeze" files, which lock up a file trader's computer for a specified period of time. Another kind of program, called "silence," is designed to look through a file trader's hard drive for copyrighted music and delete any such files it locates. All five of the major record labels are reportedly involved in developing counterpiracy measures. None would reveal specifics, but representatives of several firms involved said all of the measures eventually deployed will be legal.

New York Times, 4 May 2003 (registration req'd) http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/04/business/04MUSI.html

2. GIS and Cordoba. The Cordoba miniterm this June-July will be led by Cherrice Traver and Pilar Moyano. The subject will be historical mapping of the city of Cordoba. During a planning trip in March, Cherrice and Pilar were able to obtain excellent digital maps of the city, and the students in the program are currently working with ArcView software on defining map layers corresponding to the different periods of Cordoba's history. Some of the work that Cherrice and Pilar are doing is supported by a CET grant administered through Amherst/ Smith/ Swarthmore.

3. Web Archiving. On Wednesday, April 9 the Archiving Group met, with representatives from Union, Hamilton, and Skidmore attending. We outlined the projects we are working on, and made plans for our presentation at the CLAC conference at Gettysburg College in June. Click here for the project web site.

4. Arts 215 upgrade. ITS, with support from the Freeman Foundation grant, will be upgrading the presentation facilities in Arts 215. The new projector will satisfy the needs of the East Asian Studies and Art History programs.

6. Fiji web site. CS major John Thompson accompanied Karen Brison and Steve Leavitt on the Fiji term abroad during Winter, 2003. While there, John helped the students and the Fijians conduct digital ethnographies, which he posted at the Fiji web site.

During the Spring term, John will continue working with Steve and with Mark Knowles in the Language Lab to create web templates that other terms abroad might use in the future.

7. International Programs. The web office has launched a new International Programs web site: www.union.edu/International . Comment welcome, to Tom Smith.

8. Online scheduling and calendar. The implementation of R-25, the new online scheduling and calendar system, is moving along on schedule. The system will go live for the Scheduling office on May 13, and will be presented to the primary users on campus in the weeks following.

9. Library resources. On May 6, 2003, Tom McFadden presented the State of the Library to the general faculty. In addition to a discussion of the new catalog and back-office system that will be installed this summer, he outlined the rapid increase in access to full-text journals. The library currently subscribes to about 1,400 titles directly (that is by purchasing a digital subscription from the publisher), but has access to an additional 14,000 titles through so-called aggregators. Our library, unlike many, has a complete index to all online journals.

The top half of this screen leads to the periodicals we directly subscribe to; the bottom half leads to the titles available through aggregators. Tom would like to make sure that faculty and students know about these resources, and use them.