Campus Pipeline

[Jeff Barry]

I'm wondering if any other libraries, particularly academic ones, have 
experiences at their institutions with Campus Pipeline. For those of you not 
familiar with this, Campus Pipeline is an attempt to create an Internet 
portal for colleges and universities. According to the company's web site 
(http://www.campuspipeline.com) "Campus Pipeline is designed to be the 
framework for all other applications at the institution."

Our computing center feels that Campus Pipeline should be the interface to 
all electronic information accessed by students and faculty and the company 
has told them that there are 500 institutions going to use this product. So, 
I figured that someone on this list must have had some experience with it.

One of the 'features' of Campus Pipeline is that it has a link on its 
navigation bar labeled "The Research Center" that points to a list of 
Internet resources. This link is hardcoded and cannot be changed locally. 
While a link also can be made from Campus Pipeline to the library's web 
site, the library's page (and any resource selected from it) remains in a 
frame in which Campus Pipeline displays advertising. The advertising revenue 
is evidently why the product is available at a low cost to higher education 
institutions.

My computing center is saying that Campus Pipeline was developed in 
coordination with librarians. Since I've not heard of this before,  I'm just 
trying to find out if there are any librarians who have experience with this 
product and your comments on it.

thanks,

jeff




______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com