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The School of Information (SI)  is located both in West Hall on Central Campus and three miles away in the SI North building on North Campus. The splitting of SI into two locations frustrates important educational, research, and operational communication, such as those exchanges that grow out of chance hallway encounters. The added coordination required to collaborate at a distance impedes knowledge creation and dissemination.
SI is not alone in confronting the challenges of geographic dispersion. Other groups at the University of Michigan facing similar difficulties include the Center for Biologic Nanotechnology , which is spread across the Central, North, and Medical campuses in Ann Arbor; the Michigan Life Sciences Corridor , which is spread across the state; and the researchers using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN as part of the ATLAS experiment, which spans the globe.
A major obstacle in all of these cases is the absence of rich, reliable, and easy-to-use long-distance communication tools. The time is now right to move beyond phone and email interaction to explore Internet-based high definition video, mobile devices, and Web “portlet” technologies such as the recently announced Sakai effort.
The ‘Connection Project ’ is an initiative to develop and deploy the next generation of rich, reliable, and easy-to use communication tools for faculty, students, and staff at the University of Michigan . The Connection Project will be a phased initiative to demonstrate and use campus, national, and international high-performance networks to transmit audio, video, and information among geographically dispersed sites.
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