[WEB4LIB] RE: academic web administration

[Heinrich C. Kuhn]

Lee Jaffe wrote i.a.:

> Eventually the point that seemed to win the day was that all
> of our sister campuses provided a link to their libraries on
> their homepages and therefore we looked like the only campus
> without a library.  

This is a good point, I think. Just let me tell you a story
that happened here some 3 days ago: 

PRELUDE:
One of our students was  thinking about spending a year abroad 
as a student of university XYZ [somewhere in the USA]. She 
consulted the webpages and found the philosophy department. 
In order to find out whether that department is interested in 
what she is interested in, we looked for lists of publications 
by those teaching there; result: none found. We then checked 
the major library union catalogues available here for publications 
by those teachers: rather scarce results. Results from data-
bases listing articles in journals etc. were better, but 
scarce nevertheless.

INTERLUDE:
The library of the university XYZ will most certainly hold
most of the monographs by the members of that department, 
but we could not find a WWW-link to it. The holdings of
that library might have served as an argument, that uni-
versity XYZ has strong interest in those fields our student
is interested in; but as said: we could not find a link
to that library (local search and search engine search left 
us without results as well).

OVERALL RESULT:
The student with some probability will decide to go not to 
XYZ but to annother university (although it would have been 
XYZ in case we'd have found the URL of the libary of XYZ and 
in case there should have been "relevant" books by the 
teachers at that department in that library or if the holdings
of that library would have looked "convincing" to our student).

PERHAPS TO TELL TO YOUR WWW-GODS:
Not making the WWW-pages of your library easily accessible 
will with some probability result in some of the more "inter-
esting" students not coming to your university.

   Best regards

Heinrich C. Kuhn

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|    Dr. Heinrich C. Kuhn
|    Seminar fuer Geistesgeschichte der Renaissance
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