Thanks to a new computer service provided by the College, telephone books are no longer necessary to look up business phone numbers.
Through DCIS, the College's computer information network, students and faculty now have on-line access to any of 300 NYNEX Yellow Pages in New England and New York state containing more than 2.1 million business phone numbers.
"NYNEX offered their service for free to a number of schools. It took us about two days after we received their letter to build a pathway for the connection and then we signed on," College reference librarian Cynthia Pawlek said.
"This is a system [NYNEX] does. Once you're into it, the way the data is presented and the basic way the system works is how NYNEX did it," said John James, the College's director of collection development and bibliographic control. "We have no control over how it appears. We simply connected to it so Dartmouth students could use it."
NYNEX collaborated earlier this year with Prodigy, a national computer bulletin board, to provide this service to other on-line users. However, the service cannot be accessed through Internet at Dartmouth. "You need an account and a password to access the service," Pawlek said.
Students have found connecting with this new service a slow process. "I encourage students to send suggestions to NYNEX regarding the slowness of pulling up information," Pawlek said.
Another program new to DCIS is Legi-Slate, a service that provides access to the Federal Register. The program provides daily-updated access to events in Congress -- such as bills and resolutions -- as well as providing secondary resources, such as The Washington Post.
"We acquired this program because of faculty interest from the government department," Pawlek said.
Despite DCIS's expansion, programmers say the system's memory places limitations on the types of things that can be offered on the network.
Pictures, for example, require too much memory. "We're starting to load some pictures, but the biggest problem we encounter is the time it takes to scan, catalog and put the pictures in databases," Bob Brentrup, DCIS project director for computer services, said.
"After that, you need to find computer equipment to store it on," he said.
"If we had the money, there is a long list of services we would like to put on DCIS," Pawlek said. "In the future, we hope to provide full text poetry indexes and video encyclopedias."
