Volunteerism: a new idea for filling university information technology needs

The world-wide-web provides a great means for delivering information services to a university community[1,2]. An unexpected side-effect of using the web to deliver information services is that a community member can develop new services independent of the computing services department. As an example, one of the authors (a computer science student at California State University Chico) has independently developed a tool to help students create class schedules. This tool reads course information from the university's public web pages and uses it to automatically create custom class schedules for individual students. Over five thousand students (nearly half of all registering students) used this tool to create their Fall 2005 schedules.This paper presents the development and deployment of the scheduling tool as an example of information services volunteerism. It includes a description of the genesis of the tool, a discussion of how it has been integrated into the university supported information services, and an overview of the scheduling tool.