Cal Lutheran Gets Wired for Age of Information : Technology: Campus’s new fiber-optic cable lines provide computer access to e-mail, library catalogue and classrooms as far away as Kentucky.

A minute past midnight and the doors of Cal Lutheran University’s library are locked.

You have to read Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for a 9 a.m. class, but you have searched the dorm from top to bottom and cannot find a copy of the play to save your life. What to do?

In the old days, you probably gave up and slept through the class to avoid meeting the disappointed eyes of your professor. In the days of high-technology, there is an answer.

Return to your dorm room, flip on your computer, dial into the Internet and tap into the Shakespeare files, where scripts of all his plays, complete with analysis and commentary, are at your fingertips.

This summer, while students were off working as waiters, lifeguards and the like, crews were busy wiring Cal Lutheran, laying 58 miles of fiber-optic cable throughout the Thousand Oaks campus.

About 3,500 students, faculty and staff will be able to access Internet to use e-mail, browse through the library catalogue, do research, and share classroom cyberspace with students as far away as Kentucky and as close as Oxnard. Its official name is CLUnet, pronounced “clue-net” on campus.

“We’ve really taken a giant step forward,” said Ken Pflueger, Cal Lutheran’s director of information services. “We’ve put in the infrastructure to do things that haven’t even been thought of yet.”

Installing the system cost the university $1.8 million. Pflueger said he expects that Cal Lutheran will spend about another $1 million over the next two years enhancing and improving the system.

Cal Lutheran will start issuing user accounts to everyone on campus Oct. 1. But the buzz about the new technology has already spread across campus.

“Someone got hold of this,” said Pflueger, picking up a Xeroxed draft of a pamphlet for students explaining the services. On the back is an order form for user accounts. “It’s been photocopied and passed out by someone, I don’t know who. We’ve already got a stack of them filled out already even though we haven’t printed the real pamphlet yet.”

Although many students are already familiar with computer technology and using Internet, Pflueger said he expects some of Cal Lutheran’s 300 faculty members to balk at the leap to high-technology. Electronic mail alone might baffle them.

“No one likes to admit that they don’t know things,” he said.

So the more technologically aware professors on campus have volunteered to mentor their colleagues, teaching them one on one about the system.

Several professors were instrumental in designing the system and have already been using it in classrooms.

Last year, Harry Domincone, an assistant professor in Cal Lutheran’s School of Business, began using Internet in his classes for research. One student working on a term paper about the European holdings of a U. S. food conglomerate was able to use Internet to get obscure information from a library in Pisa, Italy.

Domincone also used Internet to hook his students up with a business class at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. They worked on a joint project all semester, sharing ideas and research.

“Students here had the benefit of engaging in group discussion with people with different kinds of world experience,” Domincone said. “They also had entire libraries at their fingertips.”

Today’s electronically sophisticated college students demand this kind of technology, Domincone said. “Cal Lutheran will be one of the first internationally to get it going,” he added.

The system was designed by Fugitsu Business Communication Systems and National Systems Research Co. Fugitsu plans to use Cal Lutheran as a selling model to line up other universities, he said.

“We’re the original aluminum-siding house that everyone wants to drive their clients by,” Domincone said.

Andrea Huvard, a biology professor and director of Cal Lutheran’s Center for Instructional Multimedia, has big plans for the new network. She will put her course syllabus on the network, as well as lecture outlines and diagrams. Eventually, she hopes to be able to put slide shows of marine life in the system, contributing to the general store of information on the Internet.

She also plans to use multimedia presentations in class, using technology to show students three-dimensional images of invertebrates and marine animals.

But she does have some doubts about technology replacing traditional teaching methods.

“I may spend three or four hours putting together a multimedia lecture that I deliver,” Huvard said. “It’s fun, but did they actually learn more about marine biology that day than if I had just drawn on the chalkboard? It’s a question that I’m constantly struggling with.”

Rorik Melberg, 21, a senior majoring in computer science, is already well-acquainted with Information Age technology, particularly the Internet.

“Once you use it, it’s so easy,” Melberg said. “It’s great. I love it. The Internet has tons and tons of information on any subject.”

He was happy to get a letter in the mail from the university this summer telling him that he would be able to access the network from his dorm room.

“The computers in the library are slow,” he said. “And they close at midnight.

“The big thing for me is going to be being able to download pictures and files, just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers. “You won’t have people waiting for computers behind you. Twenty-four-hour access.”