Content area
Full Text
Introduction
Universities have come to use the web intensively to provide information and communicate with users and other stakeholders. This web presence is often managed and supported by a team located in a central service department. Generally this is run separately from e-learning. Direct maintenance of much of the content is devolved to departmental web authors, though this creates problems of controlling and standarising content. The university website is an important institutional activity, increasingly central for student recruitment, but also in providing information for the day-to-day operations of the university, for example through live access to web-enabled databases. Yet to date there has been relatively little substantial or academic research on the management of university websites[1] . As the pages of CWIS illustrate, this is in stark contrast to the amount that has been written about educational applications of the web. Studies from any sector on website creation as an occupation are few (though there are some useful theoretical contributions in [11] Kotamraju, 2002, [12] 2004). This paper presents findings of a web-based questionnaire of those working in the area of university website management, intended to partly fill this gap.
Background
The series of conferences organized by Brian Kelly of UKOLN, the Institutional Web Management Workshops (IWMW) (see www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/), have been remarkably effective in mobilising practitioners across the sector to debate issues of practice in university web management. Attendance at the conference and reference to the archive of past papers is probably the best way to learn about the technical and management issues in the sector - combined with Kelly's own presentations and now his blog (see www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/ and http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/).
For the more systematic study of the sector, a beginning is provided by [1] Armstrong et al. 's (2001) research based on e-mail survey and interviews, undertaken from November 2000 to May 2001. They found "webmasters"[2] to have heavy workloads, with responsibility for the website being generally only one of several roles: none spent 100 per cent of their time on the web ([1] Armstrong et al. , 2001, p. 40). Equally, graphic design, and particularly server management, as the most specialised areas of the work were likely to be handled by persons outside the functional web team where there was one ([1] Armstrong et...