managing academic library websites

[Carolyn Jardine (Cary)]

I am new to this listserv so hope this is an appropriate query...

I am one of the reference librarians on the staff of a small
non-residential graduate school library, and for the past 4 years have
also been the website manager.  Last year we totally overhauled our
website, creating a new one virtually from scratch with Dreamweaver and
hosting the pages on our own server.  We now have over 150 pages and a
fairly significant portion of my job involves updating, maintaining, and
creating these pages.  Our school has recently hired a web services
manager (new position) who has been given the job of managing our website.
 We (library staff) can still "be responsible for content" but we can no
longer host our site on our own server or make edits, changes, etc
ourselves -- everything has to go through the school's web services
manager.  This seems less than practical to me and I am afraid of having
to wait in line with everyone else for changes to our site which often
must be made RIGHT NOW in order to maintain quality service for our
patrons.  My question (finally!) to this list is, what is customary for
academic library websites as far as maintenance and hosting?  Don't most
libraries have their own web services manager, someone on the library
staff who is trained and responsible for making timely edits, updates, and
changes?  Don't library professionals have a better idea of how to manage
their own website?  Other academic department pages and institutional
homepages have a VERY different purpose than library pages and are
traditionally nowhere near as dynamic as library pages...Help!  How can I
convince those responsible for this decision that control of our website
is better left with us, where it has been successfully designed and
managed by library staff?

Thanks much for any suggestions, experiences, etc.

Cary Jardine, Librarian
Reference Services
Antioch New England Graduate School
Keene, NH  03431
603-357-3122 ext 330
carolyn_jardine at antiochne.edu