Latte and Online Library Services were vital elements of our successful academic journey at Brandeis University. They were also very important educational tools that enabled us to retrieve course lectures, materials, and readings. At times, Latte played an important role in keeping our exchange with our classmates and professors productive (even when we were not physically present on campus). While each Brandeis student took a different path in life after graduation, which made our Alumni community vibrant, diverse, and geographically dispersed, we have strived to keep those ties alive with our alma matter, Brandeis University. One way for this connection and on-going learning to continue is to keep our off-campus access to legacy Latte system and online library. The university did not inform us of the rationale behind its decision to cut access to these important services. It was all too shocking to realize their sudden stop without timely information, which could have helped us to download some of our class materials. Unfortunately, many of these had gone lost throughout the years, mostly due to computers' failure, relocation, and so forth.

By this petition, we are asking, as members of the Brandeis Alumni Community, a restoration of our off-campus access of both Latte and online library systems. These two different services provide us with an opportunity to consult our course materials, keep in touch with our professors, and most importantly reflect on the value of the learning provided during our Brandeis academic journey. As some of us live in developing countries where the use of such knowledge is important, yet the access to academic information is widely unavailable if not restricted, the Latte and online library systems provide an important avenue to bridge this availability gap, and a window for feeding our intellectual interests without fearing for the loss of technical materials that would have been difficult to obtain otherwise. The online link to the Latte from our email system also provided an ease-of-use functionality that created an incentive for most of us to consult these materials anytime without fearing that they might get lost. It is quite shocking that IT services and Brandeis University made the decision of stopping our access without due consideration to the importance of Latte and online library services to us as a community of learning and as agents of social change. This stopping of Latte and online library access heavily impacts our capacity to keep this learning connection with the university vibrant! It is mostly shutting our capacity to make use of our class materials in life arenas very much in need of the practice of that academic knowledge. As a result, we urge Brandeis University Administration to reconsider its previous decision, and to restore our off-campus access to Latte and to the online library systems.

Sincerely,