Automatic date up-date

[Pam Davies]

> From:          "Stephen Graham" <sgraham at lbs.lon.ac.uk>
> To:            Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
> Subject:       Automatic date up-date

> Does any one know of a way of  periodically automatically up-dating 
> the date on web pages with out actually going to each one 
> individually?
> 

Please don't!  I use Netscape's "What's new" to check out the pages
to which I've made links from our own web site, checking visually the
pages which Netscape tells me have changed in case they have changed
in a way I need to know about.  Changing the "date updated", and
nothing else, seems unnecessary and in fact positively unhelpful.
(There are some pages which regularly get picked up as changed
because their date changes when nothing else does, but quite
reasonably when they are an index to a lot of other data and the
update is to the underlying database - like Thomas Dowling's
splendid http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Libweb/ )

If you have to have something, at least phrase it as "This 
information was last updated... and verified ...", and make sure that 
before changing that date you *do* cast an eye over it to see that 
nothing has changed - phone number of a staff member, link to some 
external resource, or whatever!

I agree it can look a little odd to have a page with an old "last 
updated" date, but you have to hope that people will know from the 
quality of your web site that you *would* have updated it if there 
had been any need to do so!

Pam

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Pam Davies, Senior Assistant Librarian,
Edward Boyle Library, University of Leeds, LEEDS LS2 9JT, UK
email: p.m.davies at leeds.ac.uk phone: 0113 233 5543 fax: 0113 233 5539