Maintenance is so booooooooooring

[SHERYL DWINELL]

> people check the links and update their pages.  But there are a few people
> who say they don't have time to look at the reports and do anything with
> them.  What do you do then? 

Well, I delete them.  If I mail deadlinks to someone and don't hear from 
them in two weeks (of course I make sure they aren't on vacation or away 
for some other reason), I remove them from the page.
> 
> I guess maybe there isn't a good answer to my question.  I send reports
> about broken links.  I send notices about new resources that people may
> want to check out.  Librarians can get help from LAs and students to mark
> up their pages.  But in some cases, the pages are still basically
> abandoned by the people who created them. 

Perhaps you need someone in a higher authority to step in who sees your 
side of things and thinks that these pages are important to the 
library.  At our library, the Collection Development librarians are 
responsible for their subject area pages.  The person who oversees the CD 
Librarians has bought into the program and has taken the lead (with some 
prompting from the Web Committe at times) in pushing the CD Librarians to 
take care of their pages.  This hasn't been completely successful since 
we're dealing with a handful of  librarians who have just decided to be 
stubborn about it and have blown off responsibility. There's just so much 
you can do to push someone in this kind of situation.  My 'solution' has 
been to suggest that they  pass off the responsibility to someone else in 
the library who IS interested in the subject matter and would maintain the 
page.  I haven't gotten to far with that idea yet, but I'm still 
hoping. To me, it reflects negatively on the library if the information is 
stale, or the person compiling the page has made a half-hearted effort.