Twenty Garden St. is about to lose an old friend: its nearly two-decade-old computer system.

According to officials in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), the Registrar's Office is in the midst of a massive technology project that will revamp the entire FAS record-keeping process.

When the initiative--managed by independent computer consulting and software production company Nevo Technologies--is fully implemented, departments, Houses and administrative offices will make changes to course listings via Web browsers; students will gain access to their course schedules and grades on-line; and examination scheduling and calendar planning will be fully computerized.

It's a utopian vision: no more mad dashes past the Sheraton Commander to reach the Registrar's Office before the 5 p.m. deadline on study card day, no more inefficient paperwork for departmental administrators and the Registrar's Office.

Technology--FAS hopes--will save the day.

No Day But Today

The Registrar's Office has had a tough time keeping step with the march of technology recently.

The current Harvard Educational Records System (HERS) consumes time and energy unnecessarily in the face of the computer age, FAS officials say. At present, departments submit course catalog entries on paper, then officials in the Registrar's Office retype the data.

This routine inherently engenders mistakes, even though former Registrar and current Associate Dean of the College Georgene B. Herschbach notes that "there is no tolerance for error in the Registrar's Office."

Until the early nineties, the Registrar's entire staff entered study card information by hand into its computer system. The laborious process was replaced by computer-read bubble forms, according to Herschbach. HERS then spent hours--into the early morning--slowly churning out data reports.

While the Registrar has migrated its information onto faster Unix servers over the past two decades, accessing stored data still requires highly-specialized knowledge.

HERS "required expert users with at least a year of training," says Kenneth S. Ledeen '67, chief executive officer of Nevo.

The system "isn't broken, but clearly it's dated," Herschbach says.

HERS stores information relatively efficiently, but it "fails to serve analytical needs," Ledeen says.

One cannot make basic queries to the system--requesting, for example, the number of undergraduates cross-listed in courses at the Kennedy School of Government--and receive an immediate answer.