Needs

• Trend: more electronic information available, being generated
• Trend: less organization of information (done w/o librarians, clerical staff)
• Trend: decentraliation reduces ease of sharing, combining, integrating
• Cycles: varying demand for CS, MIS graduates in different areas
• Community networking
  • Schools - Librarians/Media Specialists
  • BEV - Blacksburg Electronic Village
  • 2/3 of companies are on Internet, 40% of population
• Problems with information systems
  • Late, overly expensive
  • Inflexible, hard to change/adapt
  • Hard to use, leading to errors or restricted user population
  • Hard to transition from centralized to decentralized
• VT Information Systems
  • Training: faculty, staff, students
    See Virginia Tech's Instructional Development Initiative which is supported by their hotline at 540/231-3066.
  • Building digital libraries, stimulating electronic (scholarly) publishing
  • Courseware development, distance education
  • Client-server, decentralization of all services, going distributed