MINORITY COLLEGES RECEIVE TECH - The US Census Bureau is providing a number of colleges and universities that have minority populations with computers and other hardware from the US. The bureau will donate $5.4 million worth of hardware to 82 tribal, historically Black, or predominantly Hispanic and Latino colleges and universities. In addition, it will donate 15 workstations to each school. The donation comes as government efforts to narrow the digital divide are being praised. A recent government report revealed that while minority households have fallen further and further behind the national average even though Internet access has increased in minority households in the past two years. (Civic.com, 2 Nov 00)

THE COST OF TECHNOLOGY SUPPORT IN HIGHER EDUCATION - "The COSTS Project: Capturing the Cost of Supporting Technology Services in Colleges and Universities" is a collaborative project of David Smallen, Director, Information Technology Services, Hamilton College and Karen Leach, Chief Information Officer, Colgate University. Long-term goals of the project are to:

- identify a core of IT services that should be common to most institutions of higher education
- identify exemplars for each IT service
- develop benchmarks that are useful for comparing the costs of providing IT services among various institutional categories
- determine components of the total cost of ownership for desktop computer equipment in higher education

For more information on the COSTS Project, CLICK: http://www.costsproject.org/ (CIT INFOBITS Oct 00, No. 28 ISSN 1521-9275)