CNAV

CNAV (College NAVigation) is a portal developed by Gettysburg College to provide a gateway for information about your college experience. CNAV is many things to many people and even looks and functions differently depending on who's using it.

Log into CNAV - You must have a valid CNAV account.

CNAV accounts are available to the following groups of people:

• Students (brochure - MS Word format)
• Prospective Students
• Parents (request an account) (brochure - MS Word format)
• Faculty members
• Staff
• Administrators
• Alumni (request an account) (brochure - MS Word format)

For all of these groups, CNAV provides links that help to get people, things, and places together. These general features allow all users to:

• Update personal information: CNAV allows all community members to update their personal information (addresses, names, billing addresses, etc). Students, faculty, and staff can also inform CNAV of the location of their homepages, resumes (or vitae), and portfolios.
• Maintain interests: Early on, users are encouraged to tell CNAV about their personal interests. CNAV uses these interests to point out campus events and URLs that might be of interest to each user. To protect privacy, users have the ability to "hide" their interests from other users of CNAV if they wish to.
• Find interesting things: CNAV has a unique and powerful tool that allows it to find connections between people, things, and events based on personal interests. Obviously, students can use CNAV to find courses that meet their specific interests. However, they can also use CNAV to find clubs, symposia, lectures, concerts, internships, service-learning opportunities, work-study programs, and volunteer opportunities. Users can even use CNAV to find other users with similar interests.
• Learn about campus events: Formal courses are only a part of the college experience. Other campus events include clubs, organizations, internship possibilities, study abroad programs, work-study programs, service-learning opportunities, lectures, symposia, movies, festivals, plays, concerts, recitals, and various cultural events. All of these events are part of the CNAV universe. To ensure that all campus events are included, CNAV allows any user to submit an event to be listed. Each event can be described in detail, and a link can be made to the event's web page. CNAV users can search for a list of events on a particular date(s), all events about a particular topic, or even just events that match that user's specified interests. Each user is given access to a "Cool Page" listing upcoming campus events. Users can customize this display, asking CNAV to only list items that match one or more of their registered interests.
• Create email aliases: CNAV allows users to create instant, temporary, email aliases as a result of almost any search or query. For example, a user could quickly create an alias to email all Senior Biology Majors living Off-Campus.
• Complete complex keyword and multiple condition searches: CNAV provides two types of search tools (1) keyword searches based on the Excite search engine, and (2) multiple conditions database searches. Keyword search tools exist for searching through faculty, the campus community, and course data. Each tool allows the creation of an instant email alias based on the search results. The search engines make use of all information about each item (including web pages) when performing a search. Multiple condition searches allow very specific searches based on certain criteria. For example, in CNAV it is possible to find all students living on a particular floor in a particular building; to find all courses taught in the last 10 years by a particular professor; to find all English courses with available seats on Tuesdays at 10 am; and so on.
• Submit bookmarks: CNAV has a series of campus-wide bookmark tools that allow each member of the campus to submit URLs to the global URL database. This database can be thought of as a set of "bookmarks" that the entire campus shares. What makes these bookmarks unique is that each URL can be tagged with interests, which CNAV then uses to draw the attention of other CNAV users who have expressed similar interests. CNAV keeps track of who submitted each URL, as well as the date, so that a user's name can be used as selection criteria as well.
• Customize the CNAV view: CNAV uniquely draws every CNAV web screen based on that particular user's preferences. This includes the ability to choose between three different menu systems, the ability to specify a different startup screen, and the ability to ask CNAV to filter things based on how well those things match the user's chosen interests. For example, it is possible to have CNAV only display campus events that have a very high degree of correlation with your personal interests and hide those from view that do not.
• Maintain privacy: CNAV includes a detailed privacy subsystem that allows each user to carefully control who on campus can see each item of their "public" information such as their photo, campus address, campus phone, home address, home phone, class schedule, etc. There is a separate level of access control for students, campus employees, and the outside world. Each data item (photo, home address, phone number, campus address, etc) is individually controlled. For example, it is possible for a student to allow CNAV to display their photo, campus phone number, and campus address to fellow students, but to only display their campus phone number to people outside of the college. Privacy controls extend to transcript access, display of interests, and permissions granted to parent accounts. All users also have the power to change their CNAV password at any time.

Outside of these general functions, what you can do within CNAV depends on which one (or more) of these groups you belong to.