Students will be able to browse the Organizations, Regulations and Courses book on the world wide web later this year, and they may be able to skip registering in person at Alumni Hall due to advancements in putting College resources on-line.
"We hope the day is not too far away where going to the Registrar's offices is a thing of the past and we can abandon the registration scene at Alumni Hall," Registrar Thomas Bickel said.
Students will be able to electronically search for classes by various criteria, like meeting hour or distributive requirement. The electronic format will also aid in departments' revision of the course catalogue.
The on-line format will eliminate the need for the Prospectus of Courses issued every Spring term, Bickel said. Professors may be able to include course syllabi in the on-line course descriptions.
And the digitalization of the ORC, which is now updated using the desktop publisher Framemaker, has already saved the College about 30 percent in data-entry and typesetting fees, according to Computing Service's newsletter Interface.
Dartmouth has pioneered moving resources on-line, beginning 10 years ago with the Dartmouth College Information System. The Baker library catalogue, encyclopedias, the complete texts of Shakespeare's plays and a leave-term job index are among the resources that have been on-line for years.
Although the technology necessary for putting the ORC on-line has existed for years, the project was not a top priority until recently due in part to the size of Kiewitt's staff, according to Director of Computing Larry Levine.
"There are tons of good ideas floating around," he said. "But there are only so many people who work for Dartmouth College."
Dartmouth is not alone in its struggle to make information and resources available on-line, Director of Academic Computing Malcolm Brown said. On-line formatting is "definitely the way things are going everywhere," he said.
Levine said Dartmouth has not lost its edge as a computing pioneer.
"We're still leading the pack," he said. "It is just that the pack has decided computing is a good idea."
One obstacle to putting the ORC on-line has been the traditional method of printing and publishing, according to Director of Computing Services Communications William Brawley.
None of the ORC's content was kept in an electronic format. Pages from old ORCs were cut out of the book and sent to individual departments for updating.
