Summary of August 16 Web-Walkers meeting

Date: Thu, 31 Aug 1995 13:39:38 -0400
From: Judy Hallman 
To: web-walkers@gibbs.oit.unc.edu
Subject: Summary of August 16 Web-Walkers meeting

Summary of August 16 meeting on Web policies and procedures
[Thanks to Tiffany Davis for her notes.]

I headed up this presentation.

I displayed some of the policies and procedures that are online, under "About the UNC-CH Home Page" and then "Help for information providers," at http://www.unc.edu/about/provider/.

We reviewed the "Creating World Wide Web Pages at UNC-CH" document -- responsibility, guidelines for personal home pages, multiple personal home pages, and procedures for getting started on Ra.

Reviewing group Web pages, we discussed "Guidelines for e-mail generated from Web pages." There was considerable discussion of e- mail.

Should groups be required to respond to e-mail from Web pages within a certain time period? No -- no way to enforce it.

The document recommends having a group e-mail address of groupid@unc.edu aliased to one person in the department. There are some problems associated with this. For one thing, we recommend logging messages and those logs will come out of the disk space quota for the personal userid, not the group's disk space, the way things are set up now. OIT needs to look at options -- like saving e-mail on Ra so the space comes out of the group's quota.

It was recommended that the mailer (cgi-script) automatically reply to the sender; notifying the sender that the message was received and validating the e-mail address. Further information will be sent to the web-walkers list.

Another recommendation involved having mail go to a Web database, then folks could use Netscape or lynx to read the mail and a form to respond to it.

With regard to getting a group id on Ra (and similarly, for getting a link set up to the campus home page), there was concern about the need to send the request on paper (letterhead). People should be able to do this electronically.

There was objection to the statement "The Information Coordinator takes editorial responsibility for ensuring compliance with the laws of the US, and the State of North Carolina, the standards of conduct (for students, faculty, and staff) of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and for conveying these responsibilities to contributors." It places too much responsibility on the Information Coordinator and implies that they would be legally responsible. The statement needs to be softened and the laws need to be spelled out. I took the section out.

A cgi-script that automatically updates date-last-modified was suggested. Further information will be sent to the web-walkers list.

We reviewed my proposed changes to some of the high level campus Web pages.

The group agreed that I should remove non-campus items from within campus pages; the information under the buttons on the Home Page should be campus information, except for one button that goes off campus. There was considerable discussion about the name for that button. We agreed to use "External Web Resources" for now. At some later time, we might want to move "Sites related to UNC-CH" from "External Web Resources" to the Home Page.

The addition of text to the home page describing the content of the sections was approved. It was pointed out that I should add the DTH and Gazette to the Publications description (done); similarly, add SunSITE to the External Resources description (done).

Changes were suggested for the "External Web Resources" page and these have been made (added "Raleigh" in front of "News & Observer," took out link to "Office of State Personnel Job Vacancies" adding to North Carolina State Government that that page provides a link to "Office of State Personnel Job Vacancies", changed "Other Favorite Web Sites" to "Other Useful Web sites.).

It was noted that:

People think that "Welcome to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill" is a heading and don't know that it's clickable.

Some people only see the image map. It fits the screen so nicely that they don't know there is anything below it. It was recommended that we add a clickable at the top of the page to go down to the text portion; that would make people realize that there IS a text portion.

The proposed method for removing existing non-campus info from campus pages was approved -- for example "ACADEME THIS WEEK has been moved to the Academics section of External Web Resources; this notice will be removed September 5, 1995."

Folks felt OK about " Recreation, events, and calendars" as the header, but suggested adding to the items how often the calendar is published; this has NOT been done.

One editorial change has not been made yet. It was suggested that we change "link into" to "link from;" for example, one would request a link from the campus Web to a group's Web page.

Atttendees:

Tom Black, Univ. Reg.
Andy Broughton, SOWO
Tom Bowers, JOMC
Kathleen Crook, Sheps Center
Tiffany Davis, SOE
Nancy Doyle, Registrar/ADP
Pam, Dutcher, Davis Library Reference
Lynn Eades, HSL
Elizabeth Evans, Carolina Pop Ctr
Brian Flynn, Nursing
Judy Hallman, OIT
Doris Jarrell, OIT
Chad Kearsley, IAT/Engl. Dept.
Bob Kessler, Dept. of Chem.
J.J. Kim, SOWO
Amy Kreiling, Comp Sci
Joanne Kucharski, Univ. Registrar
Pat Mullin, Academic Affairs Library
Greg O'Rear, ADP
Jason W. Purdy, Independent
Gary Pattillo, Davis Library Reference
Brenda Roberts, ADP
Derek Rodriguez, Academic Affairs Library
Bob Stepno, JOMC
Mike Thomas, Univ. Registrar
Cheryl Ward, CPC
Michael G. Williams, Student Government

Judy Hallman (judy_hallman@unc.edu)
Office of Information Technology

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