By autumn, a mouse click on the familiar “Alumni” link will bring you to a whole new world of togetherness on the Bates Web site. 

Provisionally dubbed the Bates online community and sporting a lively, newsy front page, the next edition of the alumni site will give the Bates family a wealth of new ways to stay in touch with each other and the College. 

Reflecting the advent of the “Web 2.0” era, the new site will allow users to share more information about themselves and reach out to each other more easily.

Hence the personal pages where, along with the usual directory information, Batesies can post such things as classifieds, submissions to Class Notes, and pictures. “You can post your whole wedding album if you want,” says Darcy York ’05, an Alumni and Parent Programs staffer deeply involved in developing the site.

While the personal pages and other features will make one-to-one communication easier than ever, the online community will promote better connectivity at the class, regional, and national levels, too. 

Class pages will be much more dynamic, offering improved message boards, back copies of the Mirror, Class Notes, and archives of old class letters. For the first time, says York, visitors will be able to read the class letters of the years bracketing their own. 

In the works since autumn 2004, the online community is built on technology from iMODULES Software Inc., of Overland Park, Kan. It replaces software that Information and Library Services chief Gene Wiemers characterized as “really effective 1997 technology.”

York invites Batesies to visit the site as beta users. E-mail her at dyork@bates.edu.