[WEB4LIB] managing academic library websites

[Karen Harker]

You might start by consulting the ARL Spec Kit #266 "Staffing the
Library Website" published in November 2001 (Executive summary:
http://www.arl.org/spec/266sum.html ).  

I believe that the best solution for a campus (or any organizational)
Web site is some kind of Content Management System.  There are big,
sophisticated and expensive ones (i.e. Vignette) out there, but there
are also some decent OpenSource ones (they have been topics of recent
discussion on several related lists).  A CMS is a good compromise
because it improves security and centralizes overall oversight (i.e.
provides standard templates, an ability to quickly remove an offending
site, etc.), while decentralizing the maintenance of content. 

You are right in that there may be conflicting views of the purposes of
the Web site, especially if one site is playing both Internet
(public-face) and Intranet (internal-use).  We ended up effectively with
two Web sites - one for the public-oriented campus Internet, which
advertises many of our services and resources but only provides links to
freely-available sites; and one for our "intranet", which is what our
faculty/staff/students use to access proprietary resources.  The former
requires very little maintenance, while the latter is given most of our
attention.

I'm willing to bet that once the campus Web admin starts having to
review the numerous edits and changes and additions to the Web site,
she/he will start looking at CMSs and revisions to that policy.



Karen R. Harker, MLS
UT Southwestern Medical Library
5323 Harry Hines Blvd.
Dallas, TX  75390-9049
214-648-8946
http://www.utsouthwestern.edu/library/

>>> "Carolyn Jardine (Cary)" <carolyn_jardine at antiochne.edu> 12/9/2004
6:25:21 PM >>>
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