The Committee has undertaken a review of the various components of the current UCD academic computing environment as groundwork for understanding areas of overlap, as well as for identifying gaps in needed services. Current services fall into three major categories: access routes (including hosting, gateway, and portal services), the provision of tools (including their development, design, and production), and training/consulting/evaluation services.

Out of this work has come an awareness of the need for methodologies and services that support wide collaboration, especially faculty to faculty, faculty to student, and student to student. The focus is on communication and other academic technology support services that contribute to the teaching and research missions of the campus. The existing wide dispersion of services points to a need for a Teaching and Learning Technology Center that is easily accessible for faculty to get access to these services.

They are also identifying "layers" of infrastructure services, e.g., the underlying network itself, public ports, remote access capabilities, and technology-enabled classrooms as a fundamental layer on top of which are such services as email, Internet access, and distributed file systems. Above that are content layers such as course web pages, Banner services, etc.

An understanding of the current environment will prove invaluable in the Committee's future deliberations on the direction of technology use on campus.

At a May 21, 1999, meeting over 20 individuals from various academic departments (including Computer Science, Veterinary Medicine, Environmental Design, and Biological Science), Research and Graduate Studies, the Teaching Resources Center, Registrar's Office, the General Library, and Information Technology met to begin a survey of campuswide Web services.

They are continuing to compile a spreadsheet of services, and have already identified areas of overlap (high: 4+ service providers; low: 2-3 providers; no: 1 provider) and underserved areas, e.g., ability to manage large numbers of slides, collaboration, contact point for copyright issues, Web publishing, managing published materials, database services, indexing and searching tools. They will also be considering such issues as: standards, policies, resources, target audience, scale, and funding.

The next steps include disseminating the spreadsheet to the fiat, tsp-share, and cca mailing lists, compiling the resulting information into the sheet, and reporting back to the AC4.

The Committee supported the continuation of this project, and pointed out the similarities with recommendations from the Multimedia and Databases subcommittee chaired by Bill Hornof.

The initial presentation focused on eliciting agreement on the needs that the campus has that distributed file systems can address. These include:

• The ability to access personal files remotely;
• The need to share files online;
• Providing personal web page space to students, faculty, and staff;
• A manageable way to distribute and collect course materials and assignments electronically;
• An easy, preferably automatic, scheduled back up for critical files;
• A common storage and work area for campuswide documents;
• Defining whether a single infrastructure can provide for these needs or whether we need to plan separate, integrated solutions.

The second and third parts of the presentation gave an overview of web-drives and the Andrew File System (AFS), two approaches to providing distributed file services. AFS is an infrastructure system that allows users to log into shared file space that appears to them as a network drive; web-drives are a new technology to let users share files via their browser. After viewing the presentations, the Committee authorized setting up pilots of each type of service, evaluating the results to see where they can best be used, and reporting back to the Committee in late Fall Quarter.

The Committee also discussed overall issues in response to the presentations. The main concerns that arose in discussion were:

• The need to keep security issues in mind, e.g., in considering backup methodologies;
• How a decision on student computer ownership would affect these needs;
• Intellectual property rights and associated liability issues, especially for student Web pages;
• How can we reasonably cope with the ever-increasing demand for more disk space;
• What implications are there in providing backups re the public records access requirements;
• How are we handling intranet needs, e.g., the need to distribute documents to 2,000 people who cannot be easily categorized via the official campus database;
• The necessity to be aware of privacy issues in general.

Committee members pointed out that all of these issues already exist within the departments, and that many of the services under discussion are already being provided in the departments, so we might learn from what they are doing. In addition, whatever campuswide solutions are recommended must gracefully integrate or coexist with those systems, or include a manageable migration plan.

There was a consensus that approaches that facilitate collaboration should have the highest priority, since that is a need that is not being well-handled currently.

Item deferred until the next meeting since we ran out of time.