The Reporter: June 1996, Vol.7, No.3
What's New On CPMCnet

Unless you've been keeping close tabs on the development of CPMCnet, you may have missed the explosion. After only a little more than two years, CPMC's World Wide Web site has grown from a mere handful of files to an estimated 20,000.

The rapid growth of CPMCnet closely resembles the expansion of the World Wide Web on the whole. "When I first started investigating the web in 1993, there were about a dozen sites, which were mostly academically oriented," says Jeff Zucker, coordinator of online publishing and Internet development for the Health Sciences. "Now there are literally millions." Mr. Zucker's background is in the social sciences and services, anthropology, and linguistics. As a developer of computer training programs for the unemployed and curriculum programs for education-including three published textbooks-he became interested in computers and programming as a means of communication.

An expertise in curriculum development and computer programming coordinated nicely, as he soon discovered, and eventually brought Mr. Zucker to the medical center in 1992, when he began designing hypertext information resources and databases for CPMC's local area network. In other words, Mr. Zucker was asked to transfer existing information onto the CPMC network so it would be easily accessible by staff and students. That effort developed into a full-time position coordinating CPMCnet, which is maintained by the Center for Academic Information Technology under the aegis of Bob Kahn, the center's director, and Pat Molholt, assistant vice president and associate dean for scholarly resources.

The CPMCnet site was first tested in 1993 and became public in the spring of 1994. The first files included the Health Sciences Reporter, the P&S Journal, information from the Office of Grants & Contracts, and the online version of the "Physicians' Desk Reference" ("PDR") , which Mr. Zucker designed. "After we got permission from the publisher of 'PDR' to make the book's information accessible only to authorized CPMCnet users, I downloaded the text of the entire book and organized the reference so that our users could easily access and search the book's information on line," he says.

That all sounds like a big job, but the hard work led to the foundation for a standardized site in which Mr. Zucker has established a site-wide, integrated look and feel. He's quick to add, though, that he didn't do it alone. "I developed the overall concept and approach and did most of the programming, but for the past year and a half, Gary Sebel has been a large part of CPMCnet, too." Mr. Sebel does much of the converting of files, supplied to CPMCnet from departments and centers, and much of the home page design. There have also been a number of student interns, and recently CPMCnet's family of programmers has grown to include Jason Taylor and Alex Kirtland. Additionally, quite a few people at the library and in departments at the University and Hospital have contributed to CPMCnet-many of whom now maintain their own computer accounts managed by the CPMCnet staff.

What's next for CPMCnet? Currently, Mr. Zucker is developing the online curriculum, in which the syllabi, lectures, slides, and other information from Health Science courses can be accessed by users. A prototype of this is currently on the web site but will get its official test in August when first-year students in the Science Basic to the Practice of Medicine and Dentistry course actually take part of the class via the web site. "It is hoped that this program will shorten lecture time and allow for more small-group discussions with professors. Also, it makes the course more self-paced for students."

In summary, Mr. Zucker says his main goal is to make information accessible to those who need it. "I think that's important," he says. Maybe that's why one feature of every site he designs is a "feedback button" that gives users a chance to let him know what works, what doesn't, and why.

Postscript: Jeff Zucker has become so good at designing web sites that in his off hours he has developed award-winning sites for UNICEF, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, and the National Wildlife Federation, just to name a few.