site census/survey/assessment

[Lee Jaffe]

I've recently been appointed to a campus committee charged with
taking the measure of campus Web presence.  The new IT technology
planning group wants to know the size, shape, quality and cost of
of our collective Web effort.  From the discussion at our one meeting
so far, they want us to look at both infrastructure (ie. servers) and
content.  They want to know what's working,  not working, what's
current, what's out of date, what's accurate and what's not, and put
a price tag on it.

I thought I might save us a little bit of effort and search the literature
and online discussions to see who's already done this work, what
data collection tools, assessment models or other resources had
already been developed towards this end.  I'm looking for sample
surveys and checklists and measurement tools which we might
apply to this project.

So far I've located none (zero, nada, empty set).  I've searched the
ERIC database, Google and the archives of web4lib.  Perhaps the
problem is terminology.  Website "evaluation" and "assessment"
consistently refer to a different kind of criteria focusing on the users'
judgment of the authority of an online resource. And we're not really
ready to address site usability criteria at this point.  Since we're talking
about a reflective process, I've also tried "self-evaluation" and "self-
assessment" with equally unhelpful results.  "Census" doesn't help
either.

I'd appreciate any help in this matter.  Any pointers to literature or other
resources or just some terminology coaching will be appreciated.
Thanks.

-- Lee Jaffe
-- 
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Lee David Jaffe               Library Computing & Network Services
168B McHenry Library                                 ldjaffe at cats.ucsc.edu
University of California             831.459.3297  fax: 831.459.8206
Santa Cruz, California 95064       http://people.ucsc.edu/~ldjaffe