The boundaries to campus were well known in the pre-Internet era. Computer centers focused solely on the campus community with relatively little concern for the surrounding population. Even when providing off-campus resources such as dial-in modems, these resources could only be used to access resources within the immediate campus. Similarly, libraries limited themselves primarily to the on-campus students. While visitors from the surrounding community or another college might visit the library, this activity was always a barely noticeable fraction of the the library's patron activity. .

Today, the boundaries to campus have become very blurred. For example,

• Students access campus via many different Internet Service Providers (ISP) during vacation breaks.
• Students participating in study-abroad programs use the Internet to remain active on campus.
• As services like RoadRunner and ADSL become more popular, even faculty within the local calling region connect to campus via third-party services.
• Students in the University Without Walls program pursue complete degree programs with only occasional visits to campus. These students increasingly utilize the College's online library resources

This lack of the discrete campus boundaries leads to a number of important challenges:

• What is the computer center's responsibility to support users connecting to campus via a third-party ISP?
• When the library negotiates a site license for electronic references, it is no longer effective to define the campus by a finite list of IP addresses.
• Firewalls and other security services cannot filter by IP addresses alone.

Skidmore College CITS has partially adapted to this challenge by installing a directory server based on the lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) to authenticate college membership and control access to on-line services. Security services like these will become increasingly important as the blurring of campus boundaries expands.