Princeton offers students a wide array of electronic resources

Welcome to the world of advanced electronic resources.

While your parents are still struggling to program the DVD player, at Princeton you will be able to research your term paper, send e-mail to your friends or tour a museum in Paris — all from the comfort of your own dorm room.

All you need is a computer and a network connection to tap into the University's Dormnet system.

So instead of becoming a "have-not" on an information-driven campus, overcome your computational phobias and learn about the electronic resources available to you as soon as you arrive at Princeton. Attend a Computing and Information Technologies (CIT) seminar or ask one of the many hackers found in the computer cluster located in the basement of the physics building.

Even if you do not have your own computer, you can access information resources throughout the world from one of the many PCs located in campus clusters and the declining number of Macintoshes.

The clusters also contain laser printers connected to Dormnet so that students can print out papers directly from their rooms.

The following is just a sampling of some of the resources available to Internet surfers:

Electronic mail. E-mail is a great way to communicate with friends, TAs and professors, especially when you want to avoid having to actually talk to them.

Besides inane conversations with friends, e-mail is also used heavily for academic purposes. Some departments, especially engineering and, surprisingly, comparative literature, rely heavily on e-mail for professor-student communication. A few professors go all out, setting up mailing lists in which students' electronic questions or comments are automatically distributed to their classmates.

The World Wide Web. You can access pretty much anything imaginable from the Web. Take a guided tour of a museum of Renaissance art, check out scientific diagrams or read a newspaper, complete with pictures — all using an idiot-proof system of pointing and clicking with the mouse.

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Besides catching the latest headlines in newspapers, magazines and journals, you can even access complete texts of many books. Read Dave Barry columns or search the news archives to compile your term paper on the most recent international hot spot.

Definitely check out the University Webpage at www.princeton.edu/ during the summer if you can. From there, you can check out student homepages, access course listings and find out about the different student agencies at Princeton. The Student Course Guide, which provides student reviews of classes, is very helpful for selecting courses and can be found at www.princeton.edu/~scg/. Not to be missed is the 'Prince's site at www.dailyprincetonian.com/.

Lexis-Nexis. Not just reserved for privileged politics and Wilson School majors anymore, Lexis-Nexis catalogs articles from hundreds of newspapers worldwide, as well as court decisions and legal documents. The database is searchable, so you can see everything written in a newspaper or journal about whatever subject you are researching. You can access it at web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/.