User services under a free-access computing policy

Computing at Dartmouth College has a reputation of being somehow different, though few people outside the institution know exactly how or why it is different. In a May 1974 Science magazine article, Arthur Luehrmann and John Nevison described the Dartmouth difference in terms of our policy of free-access to computing by everyone in the college community, a way to effect dramatic increases in the number of computer users with only modest costs. This free-access policy has important consequences for our User Services activities; it requires a special set of priorities but permits us to serve a large number of users with a small staff.