By Cassie Ferguson

Gazette Staff

Undergraduates looking for college information once sorted through newspapers, telephone books, bulletin boards, course catalogs, and even rule books to find out what was happening. Now students just have to turn on a computer to browse the new Harvard College Web site.

Over the past nine months a team of students and Faculty of Arts and Sciences administrators set out to design and build a College site that would include all the information an undergraduate might ever need.

The Harvard College site, which officially opened on Sept. 1, is located at http://www.college.harvard.edu.

"It's a wonderful tool for students; it can be hard to find out what's going on at Harvard because there is so much happening," said Georgene Herschbach, associate dean of Harvard College. "And for the world beyond the Yard, our Web site also delivers a very good message about life in the College."

Last spring, Herschbach, Dean of Harvard College Harry R. Lewis, and FAS Webmaster Jim Scott started planning a Web site that would gather all the previously scattered online student resources in one place. Students could use the site to look up almost anything related to undergraduate life: athletic events, library schedules, course information, alcohol policies, and much more.

Around the same time, members of the Harvard Computer Society had the idea of creating an electronic calendar of College events. They would use the Web to display the calendar and to provide a way for student organizations and Harvard offices to add new events, from registration deadlines to play auditions. This calendar is separate from the one featured on The Crimson Online.

Administrators and students decided to work together to produce a site that would offer a directory of information as well as the Computer Society's constantly updated calendar.

"The goal was to provide students with something useful, and we designed around that goal," said David Alpert '00.

Over the summer, Geoffrey Fowler '00 created the graphics for the site, while Alpert led Computer Society members Michael Epstein '00, Chung-chieh Shan '99, David Krinsky '99, James Grimmelmann '98, Sean Lyndersay '98, and Samuel Klein '99 in programming the calendar. The Computer Society also recently hooked up the calendar to the frieze display in Loker Commons, providing a flashing written version of upcoming events.

Dean of Students Archie C. Epps has worked with David Alpert to encourage student groups to list their events on the calendar and to develop their own Web pages that could be linked to the College site.

FAS Webmaster Scott has assembled the graphics, links to other sites, and calendar information for Web pages, and he will continue tinkering with the site based on new ideas and feedback.

"The site's a living organism that's going to evolve according to the needs of the students," Scott said.