[Web4lib] Link to Library site on College website

[Richard Wiggins]

This thread is so much a throwback -- to 1992, to 1994, to before, and
since.

Should the electric utility that provides power to the campus have a link
from the university home page?

Should the campus police?

Should the ambulance services that respond when you call 911 to report an
accident?

For campuses that reside in northern climes, should the department that
plows the roads in winter have a link from the university home page?

Should that department that runs the campus phone system -- almost
irrelevant to students in 2010?

Should the Compting unit?

Should central Administration?  The president?

Should the city in which the campus resides have a link, to appease
town/gown relations?

I believe the answer to all of these is resoundingly NO.   The university
home page does not exist to serve those who seek to proffer content.  It's
about faculty, staff, students, parents, prospective students, alums, and
donors.  It's not about any person or entity in the ivory tower.

Now, should the Library have a link from the institutional home page?

My instinct is:

-- Yes.

-- But many university library home pages are more about the library as a
department than about the services people seek, so, maybe no.

Now: make the case.  What value do you offer that's as sought or needed as
much as Admissions, Academic Calendar, Athletics, and the rest?

/rich

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 8:56 PM, Robert Balliot <rballiot at gmail.com> wrote:

> I never saw hp.com come up in the search engines or any other .com when I
> searched 'Jane Austen'
> or 'diabetes treatment'. Never saw an Archie, Veronica or Jughead search
> yield results from there either.
>
> I wonder what the computing processing power of those 750
> computers<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem>would
> equate to today?
>
> R. Balliot
> http://oceanstatelibrarian.com
>
>
>
>  On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 8:32 PM, John Fereira <jaf30 at cornell.edu> wrote:
>
> > Robert Balliot wrote:
> >
> >> Yes, Bill, it is marketing.  If there had been active marketing going
> on,
> >> libraries would dominate the web today and securing budgets and funding
> >> would be much, much easier.
> >>
> >> When I interned in reference at Brown University back in 1993-1994 at
> >> their
> >> brand new '21st Center Reference Desk'  search results would most likely
> >> come from an academic institution in lovingly handcrafted hypertext.
> >> With
> >> the heavyweights of the Web represented by the academic offshoots of
> >> ARPANET, the edu sites dominated. Commercial was very limited. Mozilla
> and
> >> the Yahoo! index rocked.
> >>
> >
> > I'd be curious to see some actual statistics on this.  I was working as a
> > systems administrator at a division of a large .com organization in 1993.
> >  It was about that time that we moved to new facility and we had about
> 750
> > machines on the intranet (with full internet access).  That was just one,
> > albeit one of the larger ones, division in the company.  I just looked up
> > their DNS record and it indicated that hp.com was registered in March of
> > 1986, although we had a well established UUCP network before that.
> >
> >
> > And, we had PCs, Macs, and Unix on the same desk.
> >>
> >
> > I have that today.
> >
> >
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