Information Research Weblog

I imagine that most readers of the log are aware of the World list of departments etc., in the information field that I maintain. It is a continuous problem to update the links and I use Xenu's Link Sleuth to check them once or twice a year, as well as occasionally putting out a mailing to remind people to check their links and let me know if they need updating.

Academic institutions, that one might hope would do better, appear to be just as bad as everyone else in changing URLs - all it needs is a new Vice-Chancellor, Rector, or Principal to arrive on the scene and, inevitably, there is some (usually pointless) 'reorganization', as a result of which the URLs are thrown in the air and come down we know not where. My favourite hate is the database-driven list of courses that is structured first by date, then by subject - with the result that the URLs change every year.

It's easy to avoid this: all one needs is a 'redirect' instruction in a meta-tag and the user can be transferred from the old URL to the new one painlessly and I can find out when this has happened by using Link Sleuth. Given the number of Web-based directories that are not well-maintained this would result in thousands of hits resulting in satisfied instead of frustrated users.

In some places (nameless to protect them from shame) the public relations department has taken over the Website completely, producing a structure that is supposed to be geared to the needs of different kinds of potential users, but often ends up satisfying none of them.

The silly thing is that it isn't too difficult to produce an architecture for a university site - they all have more or less the same structure of faculties and department, with separate research institutes in some case, and other, fairly arbitrary elements tacked on. External users generally want to find a department, a course, a research group, a person, the library, and possibly the Vice-Chancellor's (Rector's, etc.) office - but the number of sites that make it difficult to find some of these is legion. Finding the University Library on the Sheffield site, for example, used to be a serious problem until (presumably because of numerous objections) a 'quick link' was put on the top page. Individual departmental sub-sites reveal the same kind of problem - sometimes there are links to the staff list, sometimes not.

And why do US universities (and those elsewhere influenced by them) use the term "Academics" to mean the organizational structure - click on Academics on any of these sites and you can get an entire mish-mash of topic headings from the simple 'Schools and departments' to a strange list (in another nameless institution), which includes guides, resources, and journals. According to the good old OED, the use of 'academics' in this way in the USA is a relatively recent coinage (1974) - the rest of the world uses 'academics' as the plural of 'academic', a noun meaning a person employed to teach or research in a university.