Career Services moved to a new system for tracking and posting jobs last month to make career and prospective employee searches less expensive and protect students' private resume information from being sold onto email lists.

Today is the last day CatTracks is available to students and staff who want to copy and paste their resume to the new employment database, said Avi Kamrat, information technology coordinator for Career Services.

The UA is one of 27 colleges and universities in the country testing the new careers database. Brown University, the University of California in Berkeley, Arizona State University and Yale University are among the other schools testing the new system.

"We wouldn't do this if there wasn't a good reason, because we're talking about some of the top schools in the country doing this. I feel fortunate that we're one of the first schools to break ground with this system," said Marie Rozenblit, Director of Career Services.

UA started on the new career services system on Aug. 27.

The new non-profit careers database and service ÷ NACElink ÷ was compiled by a group of college recruiters, employers and recent college graduates.

CatTracks had relied on third-party for-profit job listing vendors, like monsterTRAK and Experience for resume posting and interview scheduling.

Students' security on other campuses was breached in spring 2000 when Jobtrak ÷ the predecessor of the current monsterTRAK ÷ had a breach in the File Transfer Protocal server.

Though UA students' information was not released, resumes from students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Southern California, the University of California-Los Angeles and the University of California-Berkeley were released from the online vendor UA was also using.

While no personal information submitted in CatTracks was ever released, Kamrat said monsterTRAK came on campus and tried to bypass Career Services completely and just obtain student information from passer-bys on the UA Mall.

Since the end of August, 1,090 people have signed up for the service, and almost 2,000 (1,887) have filled out profiles on the site.

More than 11,600 people have registered for and used Career Services Web resources in the past year, including those signing up for workshops and looking for jobs on the UA campus.

"We wanted to be the one to decide if a third party was suitable to send their resumes to or not," Rozenblit said. "We didn't want students' information ÷ there's a lot of information on a resumŽ ÷ given out randomly."

The names and ownerships of the online vendors changed repeatedly over a few years, as one business went under and was replaced by the next, Rozenblit said.

"Our main reasons for moving to this system were to maintain student privacy, contain costs, and maintain and enhance one system for a long period of time instead of having to move from vendor to vendor, thus always changing systems," Rozenblit added.

Under the old system, which was operated by MonsterTrack, for-profit employers had to pay about $25 per listing. Under the new agreement, they will have to pay $15 per listing. There is no cost to post an internship or for listings posted by non-profit organizations.

Setting up campus interviews online will be possible again by Monday at the latest, Kamrat said.

All of the features that were available on CatTracks are still available on JobLink. Students can still view their resumŽs and search for jobs, and on-campus job listings that were posted on CatTracks were transferred to the new system.

To see more about the new career database, visit: http://career.arizona.edu. Click on Wildcat JobLink