Resources on the Internet may be divided into the following categories:
Some listservs are filled with requests for information, announcements, job listings, and similar postings. This is okay if it is a agreed upon purpose of the listserv, i.e. those specifically designed for discussion about employment opportunities in a field. When there is discussion about a topic in a listserv, it is sometimes uneven, with most members remaining quiet and a few participants dominating the discussion with point-counterpoint posts. Very often, the discussion goes to minor points of interest. Rarely does one find engaging dialogue among senior scholars, institutional researchers, or higher education administrators about substantive topics that involve reflection, synthesis, and analysis. Perhaps this is too much to expect when interests, positions, and backgrounds are so varied. I believe it is because too few people realize the true opportunities which listservs provide and do not invest the time and thought to making them work for their benefit.
One quickly finds that there is no single listserv meeting the complex needs of the IR community. The Electronic AIR (AIR-L) and SCUP E-Mail News are not discussion groups, but edited, electronic publications. AIR-PAL has had some dialogue, but has not really taken off yet. The six new AIR-specific listservs now offered with help from Bates College, (JCAR-L, Rank-L, IPEDS-L, Stand-L, SRK-L, and Recert-L) are exciting ideas, if institutional researchers use them for their intended purpose. They break the discussion of varied IR interests into specific channels, but they have just begun.
Darell Glenn of West Virginia's SHEEO office produces a feature in the Electronic AIR called ListWatch, which is designed to "save the time and effort of IR professionals who want to know more about electronic discussion lists before subscribing." This is an invaluable service. There are thousands of discussion lists. Those representing disciplinary affiliations are the most evolved and you need to subscribe your way through a series of listservs to find those which will meet your current needs. Depending on your office's responsibilities, you may find great listservs for assessment, facilities planning, finance, and student affairs. The student affairs and continuing education listservs are more evolved than those for IR and you may need to subscribe to different lists at different times to keep up with each field.
The 15,000+ newsgroups which are available depending on your Internet service provider offer an infinite world for discussion. One no longer has to have a separate newsgroup reader installed, since Netscape and other browsers incorporate this into their most recent versions. Few general higher education groups are available, though. ASHE-L has an accompanying newsgroup with many of the same postings. This is an underutilized resource and is somewhat proprietary to the mission and purposes of the HEPROC group of discussion lists. Newsgroups make no demands on listservs and accompanying archives. Many institutions have their own newsgroups for students, research institutes, and other groups and these provide an invaluable and sometime bizarre glimpse into university life. Services have developed on the web which allow search and retrieval of newsgroup posts by sophisticated search criteria. Whether it is an arcane discussion of getting around problems with a software package or learning to use HTML forms, you will find one or more newsgroups dedicated to this discussion. Newsgroups, contrary to listservs, often move very quickly and have very invested participants.
Some institutions participate in special e-mail discussion groups. These are not listservs, in that the distribution of postings is not automatic and there are no archives. Rather, postings are sent to a central e-mail account and distributed to a group listing of e-mail addresses. This allows for strict editing and control of postings. The Southern University Group (SUG) is an example of this pseudo listserv. Member IR offices respond quickly to requests as part of a tacit agreement with institutional peers. These electronic e-mail groups facilitate numerous types of data exchange, from sharing current IPEDS reports to quick surveys about policy issues.
Two additional types of electronic discussion which are not yet being used much in IR are electronic conferences or forums and chat rooms. Conferences/forums/bulletin boards allow readers to post and reply to messages threaded by topic. These can be seen everywhere from the online edition of the New York Times to the support forum homepages for software packages. They allow you to do your homework by reading what others have written about a topic. I am in the process of developing an electronic message board for VAMAP, the Virginia AIR group. Chat rooms no longer require special add-in software to access them. These live discussion rooms permit users to post comments and read replies in "real time." It is possible to host a virtual conference of IR professionals all clicked in to the same chat room discussing a hot issue. Other untapped possibilities include live, Internet phone conference calls and live video/audio conferencing - all a major departure from the often outdated approach of listserv discussion groups.
Almost every level of government that your institution interacts with, whether in compliance reporting or political posturing, offers current data to your office via the web. Get to know the U.S. Dept of Education homepages and gopher sites. But more importantly, watch for analyses done by your SHEEO. Be aware of systems for tracking federal and state legislation, finding U.S. and state code, and obtaining electronic versions of critical documents. The many federal locator homepages are a good place to start, but don't hesitate to start trying keywords for hot topics in your favorite search engine. Make a point of documenting every level of homepage that could be of use and share printed copies with key administrators to encourage their use of the web.
Many specialized online publications are available to help you keep informed about Internet resources, including Web Review, Culture in CyberSpace, HotWired, Netsurfer, and the Scout Report. These provide brief write-ups and links. Most of the major Internet publications such as Net Guide, Internet World, Web Developer, Web Week, and Yahoo Internet Life provide homepages with the links mentioned in their current issue as well as key feature articles (saving you the subscription price).
No longer is one bound by library software systems. Homepages are available to translate your search criteria into every possible software system, from NOTIS to OCLC. Try the catalogs of major research libraries. Try the periodical catalogs of the Library of Congress. Many libraries have online forms for requesting inter-library loan materials. Given increased journal and monograph prices, it is impossible to expect most libraries to house all of the documents you are interested in. With inter-library loan and searchable catalogs throughout the world, there are no limits to the information you can collect. Sometimes, though, it is easier to go the the reference room of a good library and use the many CD-Roms of literature databases which are available. Many of these are not on the web, except for students and faculty/staff with valid ID numbers. If you hunt around, though, you can usually find a web source for proprietary databases or access to similar databases which will meet your needs.
It is worth trying the same search criteria used for your public access catalog in the search engines for homepages. Other institutions may have put policy studies or data about your topic in their campus wide information systems. The better search engines allow you to search not only web pages, but newsgroups, FTP sites, software archives, and other archives. More than ever, the web offers you access to many levels of information, if you know where to look.
SHEEOs, like the feds, are trying to show the payoff from expensive unit record reporting by making summary reports available on the web. In the past year, many have moved from simply putting up SAS output as pre-formatted text to producing HTML tables of data with a nice graphical layout.
As of the end of April, 1996, at least 100 institutions have homepages for their IR offices. Many include versions of an electronic factbook and this is a great source for peer comparison data as well as policy information. Keep a lookout for world wide web pages for your peers, but don't overlook existing gopher sites, where institutions as recently as 1994 were making substantial investments of time and resources in a menu-driven approach to campus wide information systems. If your project concerns student affairs, assessment, budget, financial aid, admissions, or affirmative action, you may find homepages for these offices at your peer institutions. There are efforts in place to do for these types of offices what Internet Resources for Institutional Research tries to do for IR.
Keep going back to the homepages for your peers, as they are evolving and working like you to put up as many documents as possible to broker information.
One way to break apart this discussion is to consider the difference between sharing reports on the Internet in officially sanctioned homepages and offering what is called an Intranet. Both allow you to bridge Unix, Apple, and PC platforms with a graphical user interface. But the Intranet is a point of departure for sensitive, political information. I believe that the Intranet will become the single greatest tool for institutional research in the 21st century. Institutions will be able to provide users with various web browsers access to live and extract-based data warehouses, sensitive documents, internal publications, policy manuals, and query access to what were once client-server applications for student, admissions, human resource, financial, space, and other sophisticated management information systems.
A recent online version of the Forrester Report describes how "Over the next four years, the role of proprietary NOS (network operating system) technology will fade as the Intranet is enhanced with essential standards-based services" (Pincince et al, 1996, p. 1). Directories, e-mail, files, printing, and network management are becoming web processes and SQL query tools such as Cold Fusion for ODBC-compliant databases are now available for various platforms. This represents a "virtual" paradigm shift in using the Internet, with unparallelled access to data and services. It is the role of institutional researchers to serve as the key information brokers for the Internet and Intranet at our institutions.
When you think about looking for peer comparison data on the web or distributing an report in HTML table format as part of your IR office homepage, consider the role of the Intranet. To survive, many IR professionals have had to decentralize some of their functions in data administration and clean-up and become very proactive in reporting. The web offers immediate, low cost distribution and control of external and internal data with surprisingly low levels of programming skills. Not that the web will reduce the amount of data administration which needs to take place, but that the vision of client server architecture for distributed information systems may only be realized in the context of the web and that this is absolutely necessary if institutions are going to keep pace with their information infrastructures.
There may be online publications which address your topic. Certainly, you can use ERIC and other literature databases to find articles, books, and/ or unpublished conference papers. When you have located an author who has written about the issue or an institution which has implemented a policy, don't hesitate to e-mail them directly. While some scholars have e-mail addresses that are used only by their graduate assistants or support staff, many others and many institutional researchers are active users of electronic mail and will respond quickly and willingly to your request for information. Often it is possible to engage in a series of posts with a colleague over the course of a day about a project, moving from an initial description of the problem to synthesizing the literature, analyzing alternatives, and preparing recommendations. I find that the immediacy and intimacy of e-mail work to one's advantage in fostering an online one-to-one discussion.
Just as the CRAYON service allows you to create your own newspaper by picking the choices of online newspapers, comics, and features you are interested in, some of the proprietary services like PointCast tailor individual news items to your interest (usually for a fee). Using the many free search engines and catalogs (such as Yahoo), you can usually get the latest on a topic within minutes. By saving the links you find in a file, you can create your own homepage of resources on the topic with little effort and share this on your IR homepage.
For state-wide higher education issues, at least one or two daily newspapers usually cover the state legislature and each branch of state government has its own set of special homepages. The bottom line on scanning - the world is now wide open because of the Internet, with low or no cost to your IR office, if you are willing to spend the time tracking the issues of interest to your institution. Even if you don't implement an ongoing scanning process, you can make up for it for special projects by using the Chronicle's search engine for back issues which is included in Academe Today and using the many subject catalogs and IR/planning resource homepages which are being created.
These homepages are really invaluable. They allow you to view conference programs in advance to help you decide whether you want to attend a conference. For a conference such as the AIR Forum, associations typically provide detailed information and links to homepages for conference hotels, lists of attractions to visit, and weather reports. Even if you do not planon attending a conference, access to an electronic version of the conference program allows you to find colleagues who are presenting papers or panels about topics you are interested, whom you can contact on your own for help with projects. Association homepages provide access to electronic newsletters and order forms for other publications. In these pages you will find e-mail addresses and contact information for association committee members and elected officers, along with a calendar for future conferences, workshops, and other professional development opportunities.
Some of the AIR state organizations such as CAIR, the California Association for Institutional Research, post a list of upcoming conferences as part of their homepage and listserv. The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a weekly section on upcoming conferences that is maintained more extensively in its subscription site Academe Today. Regardless of the project area, association homepages offer much to institutional researchers in their search for Internet resources to support decision-making.
As in the discussion on associations, there is much to be learned from monitoring the homepages for ASHE and AERA and their accompanying scholarly listservs. Conference information is particularly useful for keeping track of who is doing work in certain topical areas, for example who is doing the most interesting research on faculty workload and presenting it at conferences. If your project concerns student affairs, assessment, or legal issues, there are plenty of other homepage resources available in these specialized areas.
Some of the doctoral programs in higher education administration maintain their own homepages with useful information about the field. Other homepages for research centers such as the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS), and the National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning and Assessment at Penn. State provide reports of their grant activity for dissemination to the field.
Using the many Internet e-mail directories which are available and the homepages for schools of education, you will find e-mail addresses for the scholars doing work on the topics you are interested in. Don't hesitate to e-mail someone with a question - but do your homework first and make good use of the person's time by not asking questions you could answer yourself if you did a decent literature search.
Save a survey you like to disk, then look at the use of select and value statements to learn how it's done. I developed a survey form to collect case studies for this paper. I used a CGI script written in C that I downloaded from another site to put the survey responses into HTML format. Then I printed the results and used content analysis for the coding. You don't have to go to this much trouble and my approach wasn't the best way, just what I knew how to do at the time. Using software such as WebForms or Arachnid's mail utilities, you can do surveys without CGI bin access or programming because results are e-mailed to you. The software looks on your mail server and separates form responses from mail, bringing the surveys into a table-like format which you can then expost to a database for analysis. This is a great way to handle ad hoc requests and track how well you're able to complete them.
The online malls with secure ordering forms from shopping carts of items you select from a catalog are driven by forms and scripts written with C, Perl, and products such as Cold Fusion. You can offer web access to any database for querying, updating data, or creating new records (what a survey really is in the first place). Begin to pay attention to search engines, online ordering, and other query forms at your favorite web sites to see what is possible with scripts. In the homepage Internet Resources for Institutional Research, I have several different types of scripts: (1) a script for completing a questionnaire; (2) a script to add your favorite link (really another survey); and (3) a script to search links on the homepage. Think about ways in which your office can include forms and the different types of scripts.