By Mark Wilcox, Campus Web Administrator

Changes to the Central UNT Web Site

It’s the end of summer and now is probably a good time for a quick update on things we have improved, released or changed on the UNT Web.

We haven’t made any drastic changes to the central UNT Web site but the search engine that we use has been improved. For the past year or so we had used a product called Webinator made by a company called Thunderstone. Webinator served us well, but because our site has grown so vast so quickly, we need something with a bit more power.

Netscape Compass

Enter Netscape Compass. The Netscape Compass server is a search engine that can also become a "portal" server like Yahoo!. Inside of Compass are two parts, a Web-crawler search interface like a typical search engine and the ability to build a hierarchical index similar to Yahoo. Sharon Marek, one of our Web Developers has been working with the Compass server and now has it crawling the UNT site. She has also been working hard on building the indexes. We hope to have the indexes up sometime in the fall. Compass also gives us the ability to search not only HTML, but Word and PDF files too. You can try it out by going to http://www.unt.edu/untsearch.html

PAIS Improvements and Additions

The catalogs have also gone under a revision. The new 1998-99 catalogs are up for your perusal at http://www.unt.edu/catalogs . PAIS is working hard on improving the resources they provide in print to the Web. Look for the new ViewBook to pop up sometime in mid-fall. The ViewBook is in print now. It is a collection of photos and marketing materials that are designed to help increase our visibility to high school juniors and seniors.

In case you haven’t noticed we also now have 2 video clips on our Web site now. One clip is a copy of the recruitment video and the other is a clip of Dr. Hurley talking about UNT. You can see these clips directly off the UNT homepage.

Web Courses

Finally we have also managed to bring up our Web Course Management server that uses the WebCT software package. More information about WebCT can be found at http://courses.unt.edu/webct/ . The latest information about Distributed Learning over the Web can be found at http://courses.unt.edu/ .

Until next time.

Mark