The University of Illinois Web has compiled an impressive number of firsts and honors.
The campus has the honor of having the second system to circle buildings on a map (after SUNY-Buffalo), the first to circle rooms on floorplans, the first to integrate floorplans and maps, the second to have a "virtual tour" (after Honolulu Community College), and the first to integrate maps/floorplans with a virtual tour.
The navigational system has been deemed useful enough that the Office of Facilities Planning and Maintenance has committed to furthering its development.
The navigation system was featured on Yahoo's What's Cool page, resulting in a large amount of virtual visitors to the campus.
The wheelchair access information, coupled with the maps, proved useful enough for the project to be recognized by the Disabled Student Organization with the Harold Scharper Service Award. Furthermore, DSO has committed to furthering its development.
The campus has the honor of having the second cross-linked courses catalog and timetable (after St. Olaf's College), being the first to integrate courses catalog, timetable, and graduation requirements, and being the first to integrate the timetable with floorplans.
The first version of the hypertext courses catalog and timetable was so appealing that the Communication and Computing Services Office specifically requested responsibility for it.
The Web version of the Timetable has been so successful and popular that the ph database is no longer maintained.
A paper on this project was accepted and presented at the 1994 Fall International World-Wide Web Conference. [1]
A chapter was devoted to this project in a best-selling computer book [2].
When file uploading capabilities are built into browsers, a mechanism for departments to be able to maintain their own information about room occupancy would be prudent. The Computing and Communications Services Office is currently investigating such a system.
The Programs of Study is updated every two years. Doing a wholesale translation from the paper version to a hypertext version can be hazardous to the health. It is hoped, both by the project author and by representatives of the Office of Publications, that at some point in the future, the paper version (if one continues to exist) will be derived from on-line information published by the appropriate functional units instead of vice-versa. It is doubtful that this will happen before the next version of the Programs of Study is published, but the opinion is that the version after that will originate on-line. The Office of Publications would be the natural organization to lead and coordinate such an effort.
Similar growth in the campus as a whole has been clear. An effort was made by Graham Lawlor in the summer of 1995 to quantify the size of the campus-wide web. The web's success unfortunately meant that he was unsuccessful. His tools broke after indexing 40,000 documents from 276 different servers. This is a far cry from the hundreds documents and tens of servers in existance on the UIUC campus at the beginning of the project.
As early examples of the capabilities of the World-Wide Web, the systems described in this project served to promote and publicize the use of the Web on campus. As innovative uses of Web technology, they provide publicity for the University. Most importantly, the information herein is useful in people's day-to-day life, as seen by the high number of accesses.
What is most valuable to me, however, is something that I happened to notice while walking across campus. I saw someone in a wheelchair stopped, examining a printout of Altgeld Hall with a room circled. On her lap was a printout of the map of the Quad. The accesses are nice, the awards are nice, but that student was the true verification for me that what I had done was being used as intended.
Go up to Table of Contents