European and Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems (EMCIS) 2006, July 6-7 2006, Costa Blanca, Alicante, Spain Josep Cobarsí & Mercè Bernardo Campus Information Systems for Undergraduate Students in Spain: a Country-wide Cluster Classification 1 CAMPUS INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS IN SPAIN: A COUNTRY-WIDE CLUSTER CLASSIFICATION Josep Cobarsí*, Knowledge and Information Management in Organizations – Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Information and Communication Studies, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain jcobarsi@uoc.edu Mercè Bernardo, Grupo de Análisis del Impacto en las Empresas de las Nuevas Tecnologías (GRADIENT), Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitat de Girona, Spain merce.bernardo@udg.es Abstract The availability of broad characterizations of campus information systems for students can be useful for the strategic information management of higher education centres. First we describe and contextualize a characterization model for on-line campus information systems for undergraduate students. This serves as a framework of conceptual reference for empirical work on Spanish universities. Information was gathered by means of structured visits to institutional websites and structured interviews with undergraduate students. Analyzing the information collected enables us to classify Spanish higher education institutions into three clusters with homogeneous characteristics, in the sense of their information system and organizational aspects. Finally, we discuss future research on this subject. Keywords: Campus Information System, Information Resource Evaluation, Information for Students, Strategic Information Management 1 INTRODUCTION At the end of the 20th century the opening up of information technology and electronic communication radically altered the potential for exchange of information on the university campus. In the first half of the 1990s, there were perceptible changes in the situation on campus (McClure & Lopata, 1996). But it was the common use of the World Wide Web (WWW), from the mid 1990s onwards, which produced a qualitative leap in the potential of on-line information at universities. The situation of campus on-line information infrastructure before and after the widespread use of the WWW shows two rather interesting features: first, the rapid and random spreading of electronic information resources makes them difficult to manage globally, from a strategic point of view (Long, 2000); and secondly, although the technologies for electronic information were largely invented within * Corresponding author. Tel.: 00 34 932 535 766; fax: 00 34 932 110 126