Librarians as University Webmasters

[Melinda Baumann]

 I'm interested in finding out if other universities employ librarians
as their primary webmasters. We have such a situation here at the
University of Virginia. 

 The Operations Manager of our public gopher has been a librarian for 
several years, since managing information is what we do by trade. The 
task has transferred with the technology: we now have two librarians 
(of which I am one) and one assistant who spend a quarter of their 
time performing webmaster duties for the university. 

 We are part of an editorial board, made up of staff from university 
publications and public relations, academic departments, graduate
students, and of course our computer professionals, ITC (Information, 
Technology and Communication). My colleague, Edward Gaynor, and I are 
responsible for the everyday operations of reading and responding to
mail, setting up user accounts for departments and organizations, and 
responding to basic technical and other problems, as well as making 
content and organization decisions. Our ITC colleagues maintain the 
web and gopher servers, run batch jobs and handle any special 
programing requests or problems. 

 We've found that with the advent of web and the mailto: feature on
all pages of the top levels of our web that we've increased our
visibility tremendously. We now receive requests for information from
all over the world, and are finding that the webmaster job is quickly
evolving into a very public job requiring very good public relations
skills. More than ever, we're happy that the job of university web-
master resides in the library, where we are able to put our public
service skills to test at an international level.

 I'm interested in knowing if there are other librarians who are 
university webmasters. If our situation is unique, I'd like to know 
that, too. Please respond either directly to me or to the list.
And have a look at the University of Virginia home page at
	http://www.virginia.edu

Thanks.

Melinda Baumann
University Webmaster/GWIS Operations Manager
University of Virginia Library
baumann at Virginia.EDU