Community Information Networks

[A. Bullen]

Dear all,

The URL for the NorthStarNet project is actually http://www.nsn.org.

NorthStarNet, a community information network begun in Sept. 1995, is a
cooperative venture between 30+ communities in the suburban Chicagoland area.
Like most suburbanites, the citizens of our service area may work in one city,
live in another, send their children to another, etc. etc. The idea of a
traditional CI network wouldn't work, so therefore we've developed our network
along the lines of SEFLIN (http://www.seflin.org) Each community in the NSN
project operates in conjunction with their public library. The library provides
support to community groups and organizations who in turn have web pages and
accounts on a central Sun SPARCStation 20 server. I have written several menu
and web interfaces to allow our information providers to more easily publish
information to the Internet, like a calendar of events, a subject catalog,
online editing tools, and account management tools. The help screens for these
utilities can be found at http://www.nsn.org/Admin/ltut01.html and
http://www.nsn.org/Admin/tut01.html. I am  developing other tools as well, such
as a WYSIWYG web design utility, FrontPage support, an AltaVista search engine,
detailed site-specific access statistics, link checking software, WYSIWYG CGI
form tools, and online database access so that the information providers can
mount their data to the web. I hope to tie all of this together with OCLC's
SiteSearch software, making ALL of this Z39.50 compatible and cross-platform,
cross-database searchable.

Hope this helps!

Andrew Bullen





Paul Deane wrote:

> The North Suburban Library System is building a community information
> network through the public libraries in the north of Chicago.  The technical
> person is Andy Bullen, abullen at nslsilus.org.   Cathy Deane who used to be at
> Huntington Woods, is contact person for the MT. Prospect Library,
> cdeane at nslsilus.org.  I am helping a couple of non-profits and a small
> business load web pages on the community information network.  The network
> is named North Star Net, http://www.nsn.nslsilus.org/nsn.html.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Paul Deane
> Answers, Inc.
> answers at interaccess.com
> 847-368-8870
> Fax  368-8869
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew J. Mutch <amutch at tln.lib.mi.us>
> To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
> Date: Tuesday, March 10, 1998 10:52 AM
> Subject: Community Information Networks
>
> >I was wondering if anyone out there has had experience with developing a
> >community information network.  We are in the process of creating a more
> >formal structure to the collection of pages that we are hosting for
> >various community groups.
> >
> >I'm especially interested in those who created templates for pages to help
> >simplify the work.  Examples would be even more helpful and of course,
> >links to good reference sites would be appreciated!
> >
> >Thanks,
> >
> >Andrew Mutch
> >Northville District Library
> >Northville, MI
> >
> >