OR/MS Today - February 2000

February 2000

Cleaning Up for the Millennium

By Michael A. Trick

I have a colleague here at Carnegie Mellon's business school who is a leader in his field, a brilliant mind, and a very helpful and useful person. He is also both extremely disorganized and a pack-rat, saving everything that crosses his desk. When I first met him, 10 years ago, his office was full of papers stacked to the ceiling, teetering and threatening to collapse. We had our meeting in the faculty lounge instead.

Seven years ago, this colleague (who is not in OR/MS) had to move offices. It took two secretaries and four student assistants a month, but his office was organized and packed into a couple of hundred boxes for the move (and a dumpster full of unneeded papers was removed).

Once ensconced in the new office, my colleague became a new man: his desk was clear, his shelves were neatly arranged, and his boxes were piled carefully along one wall in readiness for the "soon to arrive" file cabinets. Unfortunately the cabinets were a little too long in arriving, and my colleague reverted to old habits. When the cabinets did arrive, there was no longer any room for them; the piles of new paper had grown too high. Today, my colleague still meets people in the faculty lounge, and many of the boxes from seven years ago remain unopened along the wall.

I tell this story because I am the electronic equivalent of my colleague (like many, I think): my hard drives are filled with the detritus of years of activity, or reasonable substitutes thereof. Am I the only person who has a directory of every e-mail sent and received since 1989? Periodically, I try to reorganize my system, deleting useless files, but I invariably find something interesting that keeps my attention until quitting time. If my mother could understand computers, she would weep at the mess I make of each of mine (my wife does understand computers and does weep at what I do to our home system).

Normally this would be a private secret, but as editor of INFORMS Online, some of this leaks over into IOL. And with a deputy editor, a half dozen associate editors and a worldwide audience working with IOL, it would not be prudent to keep it in the same state as my other machines. So, periodically, I try to reorganize IOL to make it more consistent and easier to use.

Recently we have had to do a cleanup for a number of reasons. First, the front page of IOL was revamped, leading to cascading effects on the other pages. Second, areas such as Journals and Subdivisions (through the efforts of AE Jay Rajgopal) have been redesigned to better highlight INFORMS activities. Finally, we are in the process of changing machines from one at the University of Michigan (kindly supported by then Vice President-Information Technology, now President-Elect Jim Bean) to one at the INFORMS office. All of this has caused us to go through a process of deleting old files, merging redundant files and generally cleaning things up.

Reorganizing web files can lead to a whole string of problems, some obvious and some not. The most obvious problem is when a deleted page is still referred to by another page. This leads to the dreaded "Error 404: File not found" errors that have come to typify the web. This error is the easiest to find; there are a number of programs to automatically check links (Yahoo! lists 20 or so of them; we use weblint and netmechanic).

A worse error is to have a useful page that is no longer referred to by the main pages. Despite efforts to avoid this problem, two major pages lost their links during IOL's last facelift. These errors are very difficult to determine automatically, so we rely on our vigilance and the reports from users to determine these problems.

The final problem is the most frustrating: Internet search engines do a terrible job of removing out-of-date links in their databases. We continually get hits from search engines for files that have not existed since 1995! With such hits, we are faced with a pair of unappetizing choices: either we generate a "404" error, frustrating the user and making us look bad, or we provide links to the new pages, which undoes the goal of the whole reorganization and leaves us with many more pages to support and update. We have chosen to do the latter for the most requested old pages.

Search engines need to do a much better job, though, of reflecting the current pages, not the pages from years ago. Otherwise, the whole web will look like my colleague's office: disorganized, unstable and threatening to collapse at any moment.

Electronic Publishing

INFORMS has taken a two-pronged approach to electronic publishing. First, its traditional print journals are available online through INFORMS Publications Online (www.informs.org/Pubs).

Second, INFORMS has two electronic-only journals. INFORMS Transactions on Education (http://ite.informs.org) has just begun under editor Erhan Erkut and will specialize in articles on education and OR/MS. INFORMS Transactions on OR/MS (ITORMS) was INFORMS' first foray into electronic publishing, with editor Ramesh Sharda offering articles as early as 1996. INFORMS is searching for an editor to follow Ramesh. If you would like to apply or recommend a colleague, please let me know (I chair the search committee). Perhaps more importantly, if you have ideas for what ITORMS can be in the future and how it can be made a more powerful force in OR/MS, I would be delighted to hear about them. Any suggestions you have will be passed along to the new editor.

Michael A. Trick (trick@cmu.edu) is a professor in the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University and the editor of INFORMS Online.

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