In a project undertaken over the past summer by the University's Department of Computing and Information Services (CIS), all CUNY libraries have been made "Web-ready."

Reaching this goal required different approaches for the different libraries. For those libraries with LANs and Internet wiring in place, the LANs were expanded. For those without existing LANs, a LAN was created and then connected through a router to the T3 Internet Node at 555 West 57th Street. All libraries were given new Compaq workstations to raise the workstation-per-student ratio to 1 workstation per every 250 FTE student.

The work was done in four stages. First, Victor Viggiano and his staff visited each campus library to determine its technical needs. Next, teams of technicians entered the libraries to lay fiber. Then the new "Internet-friendly" workstations were delivered. Finally, the technicians returned to each campus to install and test the workstations.

The Office of Library Services expresses appreciation to Vice Chancellor Richard Rothbard and to Dean Michael Ribaudo for their support of this project, and to Viggiano and the CIS staff for organizing the summer marathon.

Additions to CUNY+ Increase Usefulness

Location-based catalogs were recently made available in DPAC, the online catalog of CUNY library holdings. Users can now search for holdings in an individual campus library by using the "SET_CAT" command. A screen will appear listing all catalogs available within DPAC. There is a separate catalog for the holdings of each CUNY library, plus a periodicals/microforms catalog.

Changes were also made in DPER, the general periodicals index. Abstracts were added to the entries in the General Science Index (beginning with entries in March `93), in the Humanities Index (back to March `94) and in the Social Science Index (also from March `94). The abstract provides a summary of the article, thereby providing much more information about it than was previously available.

NOAH Project Grows in Size and Stature

Our bilingual NOAH Web site has received seven awards to date. You can check them out for yourself by accessing NOAH (http://noah.cuny.edu/) and clicking on "Awards." At the U.S. Department of Commerce/NTIA awards ceremony in September, NOAH was given a place of honor among the ten grant recipients (out of the original 92) invited to Washington to demonstrate grant results. According to Steve Downs of NTIA, NOAH is the site they often use to show the success of the Commerce Department's grant program.

Meanwhile, the NOAH site continues to expand and evolve. New features include a "Most Read" page, with health topics shuffled daily based on the number of hits received, and a "What's New" page, listing recent changes and additions to NOAH. Current new content includes a collection of US Healthcare documents, a listing of New York Hospitals, and an updated Mental Health page, including Mental Health Patient Education pamphlets from the NY Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. In addition, NOAH recently acquired a new look, with new graphics and colors, designed by Creative Director Kirsten Dehner.

Invaluable assistance is provided by Silvia Heredia, now a full-time translator. "International sites are linking to our pages as a primary source of health information in Spanish," says Heredia. "Our original intent of helping our community has now expanded to include Latin- American communities abroad." Further help came from the successful use of summer interns to do HTML (Dehner thanks Juan Carlos Léon and Byeong Rok Choi for their efforts).

NYAM (The New York Academy of Medicine) plans to increase their involvement with NOAH by overseeing a content development policy involving the NYAM Fellows, who will review and approve the remote sites we point to help us maintain reliable health information links.

Another exciting development concerns InfoTrac. Recently, the New York Public Library (NYPL) got a grant to provide access to InfoTrac's Health Reference Center Gold, a comprehensive health information database that offers abstracts and full texts from selected health-related periodicals. Currently available for NOAH users at CUNY, METRO, NYAM, and NYPL workstations, InfoTrac will soon be available via telnet to anyone with a valid NYPL card.

Although it receives over 100,000 hits a month and is growing, NOAH's future is still uncertain. Ongoing funding is crucial to the survival of the project.