Maintenance is so booooooooooring

[Reeder Norm]

One of the problems we've found is that there may well be one person 
(me) who writes the HTML and plays some with content.  But we also 
 have Reference and Branch staff who look over and search for content. 
 With the HTML validators now at our disposal, it's almost easier to 
run our pages through them for link checking, than it is for Reference 
staff to click each link on a page to see if its broken.

We've used AOLPress to write pages and check links and it works well. 
 There are lots of others out there.  Since this one is free, you 
could give it to your staff to use and have them check links with it 
even if they aren't writing HTML.  An average page takes 15 minutes or 
so to run though the links for us.  AOLPress happens to be "what you 
see is what you get" as far as page design goes so they don't have to 
see all of the ugly HTML which they might not understand.  At least 
you can try to make it as easy as possible to check links which is 
usually the most boring process.
Thanks
Norm Reeder
Library Services Manager
Torrance Public Library
3301 Torrance Blvd
Torrance, CA 90503
310-618-5950
reeder.norm at mail.ci.torrance.ca.us
The views expressed do not necessarily represent the views of the City 
of Torrance

----------
From: 	Andrea Duda[SMTP:duda at ariz.library.ucsb.edu]
Sent: 	Wednesday, August 13, 1997 1:40 PM
To: 	Multiple recipients of list
Subject: 	Maintenance is so booooooooooring

When we were first setting up our web site there was a lot of interest 
and
enthusiasm.  Creating new pages is fun!  But now -- while we're still
putting up new pages -- there's a need for maintenance on the old 
ones.
Deleting dead links, trying to figure out where sites have moved to,
adding the occasional new site to a list, and making sure guide and 
policy
pages are up to date is work, not fun.

Some librarians consider their subject pages to be an important part 
of
the collection development responsibilities.  Others would like to 
abandon
the whole thing.

What are other libraries doing about web maintenance?  Is the person 
who
created the page originally responsible for maintaining it, or does 
that
responsibility fall on someone else?  Do you do anything about 
abandoned
pages?

          ===========================================================
                                Andrea L. Duda
                    Networked Information Access Coordinator
           Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara
                         E-mail: duda at library.ucsb.edu
                     InfoSurf: http://www.library.ucsb.edu
          ===========================================================