After years of sifting through hundreds of pages in the College's Organization, Regulations, and Courses book, students may now browse portions of the information online.
But although the ORC has been on the Internet since this year's Freshman Orientation, the online version is very much in the early stages.
Only the courses and their descriptions are available. Furthermore, this text is not searchable, and the regulations and organization section of the manual, in addition to information about majors, have not yet been posted on the World Wide Web.
Registrar Thomas Bickel -- who led the effort of putting the ORC on the Internet -- said Kiewit Computation Center is working on various projects to make the online ORC searchable, but concedes "it is still very much a work in progress."
Bickel added there currently is no specific timetable to make the online ORC searchable.
Until the web version of the ORC becomes searchable, Bickel said the only immediate advantage of the online ORC is updates to available courses and their times, which do not appear in the printed edition. The Registrar's Office plans to update the online version each term.
Bickel also plans to have next year's ORC on the Internet by mid-August, giving students additional time to plan course schedules.
The regulation section will be available sometime this term, but Bickel added that he is "hesitant to release large lists of faculty electronically" for fear it would easily be downloaded and used for other purposes such as solicitations and mass electronic-mailings.
The decision on posting the ORC's organization information will be made by the College and not by his office, he said.
One reason for creating an Internet ORC was to reduce the expense of the paper edition. Bickel said the traditional ORC costs approximately $45,000 in printing costs alone each year.
Since half of the manuals printed are sent off-campus to high schools and prospective students for admissions purposes, Bickel said he hopes making the book available over the Internet would reduce the demand for many of these additional copies.
Bickel said he hopes the online ORC will ultimately lead to a smaller paper version. "In the future, the printed ORC may contain only abbreviated course descriptions with their full descriptions online," he said.
As of yet, there is no accurate count of how many students have used the new version of the ORC.
Bickel added that the ORC is just the beginning of a plan by the Registrar's Office to eventually "post everything we publish online."
The online ORC can be found on Dartmouth's home page at www.dartmouth.edu/~reg.