Information Technology Council

Minutes for the Meeting of April 2, 1998

1. The technology recommendations from the State Regent's Citizens' Commission on Higher Education were distributed and discussed briefly.  Many areas of the planning document reflect items identified as important.
2. The draft copyright policy was distributed and discussed.  Technology use for instruction raises questions regarding the "extensive use of university resources" as applied to university copyright rights.  There will be needs for faculty to control the use of materials developed, and educated about distribution rights and requirements.  There should be an effort to limit copyright distinctions that arise only from the medium being used.  The university should also join in efforts by research libraries to avoid signing copyrights away to commerical publishers.
3. There should be coordination of efforts and resources across campus for faculty and students.  Students should be able to access resources from anywhere on campus.  There also needs to be some uniformity of account logins.  Faculty should have the same general availability of classroom resources across campus.  To succeed, there needs to be a general buy-in from colleges and units and pressure from students and faculty.  In making recommendations for these sorts of unified efforts, the ITC must be concrete, without being to specific regarding hardware and software because of the pace of change.
4. The current costs of Labnet, an effort to provide unified services across campus, is prohibitive for smaller colleges and units.  Providing central services will require some covering of these costs.  Resources must be supplied to problem areas where possible.