Comments on the computer science/computer center interface

I'd like to find out how many people in this group come from institutions of 4000 or more students. How many of you come from institutions of 2500 or less? How many come from institutions of 1000 or less students? How many of you have your own computer? Are there any of you who don't have your own computer on campus? Of those who don't have their own computer on campus, how many are using some kind of real-time system or shared system of some sort? So everyone in here is in some way already in the computer racket. Now let me get one more pair of questions and then break off from this kind of audience participation. How many of you come from institutions where your computer is used almost—not necessarily altogether, but almost—exclusively for administrative purposes? Are there any people here whose computer is used altogether for instructional or educational purposes? Okay, that gives me a good idea of where things stand. It's really quite a broad spectrum of interests and backgrounds, as one might expect. Meetings of this kind frequently announce that they are appealing to small colleges, but because small colleges can't afford to come, the medium-size colleges, who think they're small anyway because they look at their budgets and realize what they'd like them to be, are the people who make up the group. I'm pleased to see the broad spectrum of interest.

There were a good many comments earlier about curriculum. I come to you in a sense from the American Society of Information Science, a group with which I've had a good bit of involvement, and it is currently espousing a new curriculum look, inspired in part by “Curriculum '68.” In the American Society for Information Science we would make the claim—incidentally, I should preface this perhaps, with Harris's charge to me to produce some nice, controversial comments and bait you into a great deal of response—that information science is the basic routine, and computer science is a facet of it. This is also true of library science and several other fields which are quite different. All these have a common interface in an area which might be called information science, and as such, the American Society for Information Science recognizes that curriculum efforts so far have all been so computer oriented, so specifically use-of-computer oriented, that they've decided to explore the possibilities of some more curriculum material. One of the interesting things to me is that your comments this morning led me to realize that there has been no consideration built into this plan, per se, for the smaller schools. I think that's a big mistake, and I intend to try to see that something is done about it. I don't know how far this might be carried.