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The Original IdeaHere's a memo I sent to our Center's Director, Diane Gale, Ph.D., drumming up support for the basic concept. (My enthusiasm, and naiveté, is fairly obvious!) |
| To: Diane From: David Date: January 5, 1994 Re: Electronic Clearinghouse Our GOPHER site works. That is the key, I think, to something that could be pretty big: UB's Counseling Center becoming an electronic clearinghouse of counseling center/mental health information. Here is a fantasized progression of events. What do you think? 1. January 1994: Distribute to the UB campus information about our material on GOPHER (i.e., post announcements on the mainframe, send out press releases to Spectrum, newsletters, etc). (This is already planned). 2. Contact other counseling centers to see if a coordinated effort would be possible: They make available to use their materials to include on our site. 3. Locate mental health software (e.g., Scott Meier's If You Drink program) and make it available through our site. (GOPHER is not just limited to reading documents, we can also include software that a user could download to their computer and keep. Such software could be distributed under the Shareware approach, which would allow the distribution of copyrighted software). 4. Post requests on the psychology discussion groups (an international forum on the internet) asking people to send us material that would be useful on our site. This would be a request read by people all over the world. (see Note below). 5. Mass mailing to other Counseling Centers informing them about our site. NOTE: And we do not need to stop there. We could open this Clearinghouse to the entire world -- anyone, not just Counseling Center staff, with internet access could use our site. We could post announcements on the internet, letting THE WORLD know about our site. Students, faculty, business-people, politicians, gas station attendants, could all access our material. (If we went this route, however, we will need to decide if we should limit what material we make available: is there some of this material that is only appropriate for psychologists? My feeling is "no", it is all appropriate for anyone). |
Here is an email posted to a professional email list. I had posted something to this effect to several lists, resulting in quite enthusiastic responses: |
| From: David Gilles-Thomas Subject: CC's on the internet To: outreach@toe.towson.edu (outreach list) Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 15:27:28 -0400 (EDT) Greetings all. The more I talk to colleagues around the country, the more I hear about Counseling Centers that are using the internet in various ways. Here at UB we have set up a collection of documents on our gopher covering a variety of mental health topics. My guess is there are a lot of other centers doing things with the internet as well. It seems to me we should let each other know about our efforts. So, if no one else is already doing this, I'd be willing to compile and maintain a list of resources on the net that are set up by Counseling Centers. If your site has something that you would like others to know about, send me the information. I'll compile the information I receive and post it back on to this mailing list. This includes gophers, mosaic, ftp sites, muds/moos, and mailing lists. Such sharing of resources can be invaluable -- we can combine our efforts to provide much more effective services to students (and others) than if we each work separately. For example, if there is information that you would like to include on your local gopher that is already currently available on ours, you can easily and seamlessly make a link to one or more of our menu items, placing the entries directly in your menu. Please email me directly (address is below in my sig). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ David Gilles-Thomas, Ph.D. dgthomas@acsu.buffalo.edu Counseling Center, State University of New York at Buffalo Gopher: 'gopher wings.buffalo.edu' >Student Life >Counseling Center |