World Wide Web Steering Committee

Minutes
December 5, 1996

Old Business and Reports

Course Descriptions on the Web

Pete Gilbert noted that he had downloaded from a Web site a PDF file containing the complete text of the 1996-97 course catalog and thought that document might provide a starting point for course descriptions. Gordon has since explained that public affairs, at the behest of Admissions, sends the electronic files for the course catalog to an organization that converts it to HTML and publishes it on the Web.

1. Home Page Construction Kit

   Peter Peregrine, Dave Baird, and Pete Gilbert indicated they had been working toward this goal. Pete noted that he has been accumulating links for this project on his Web Builders Central Page. It was projected that the project could be complete during Term II, at which point it would be appropriate to announce its availability to the Lawrence community.

   This topic led to several related observations which are included here for the record:

   • Not all desktop systems at Lawrence, particularly in faculty offices, can support direct Internet access; if we want faculty and students to take wider advantage of the Web, we need to be sure they have the tools they need to do so.
   • Netscape, which is our browser of choice, is notoriously unstable on some platforms with some operating system versions; this instability will discourage use, so we should find out what's wrong and develop a plan to fix it.
   • Default disk quotas for students and some faculty are sometimes so low as to limit use of graphical resources in Web development; is it really necessary that they be kept so low?
   • How is responsibilty for Web development most appropriately distributed within the Lawrence organization?
   • Since these points and others mentioned below in the convesation on resources bear directly on planning and staffing in Computer Services, it was suggested we invite Mike Corbett to join us for a meeting.

   New Lawrence Web "Front Door"

   Pete Gilbert reported that he and Gordon Brown had had further conversations about this rearrangement but had made not made concrete progress. The arrival of Steve Blodgett, Lawrence's new Director of Public Affairs, may shift responsibility for this project from Gordon to Steve.

   Local News Groups

   • .lawrence.forsale and .lawrence.announce
   • Policy and application form

   Apart from the recommendation that an announcement about the availability of newsgroups should be made to the campus community, little was discussed on these topics. Generally, Usenet News seems not be viewed as the right tool to support electronic conversations related to courses, and the search for a better tool continues.

   Directory of student e-mail addresses

   After obtaining memo from Steve Butts describing the Ad Staff action in this area last spring, Steve Hirby will talk with Anne Norman and Jeanne Loehnis about next steps.

New Business

Owens visit

Peter Peregrine reminded the committee that Jack Owens' visit was intended to help launch the "Year of the Web" at Lawrence. There was discussion of ways in which this emphasis might be continued, including presentations as part of the Science Hall Colloquium (Peter mentioned particularly some work he is doing related to putting archaeological research materials on the Web) and use of the Web as a research tool by students. Peregrine and Baird will pursue during Term II.

Budget/Resource recommendations

There was brief discussion of several issues on this topic, including the possibility of an additional internal position (or budgets for outsourcing) to support Web development, whether our Web development efforts might be easier if our servers ran in a Unix environment, whether it would be desirable to identify and promote standardization at Lawrence on desktop tools (word processors, spreadsheets) that can export HTML.

Joint meeting with CIT

Not discussed.

Achieving timeliness and accuracy in our Web publications

Not discussed.

The group agreed not to meet again until after the winter break. Subsequently the next meeting was scheduled for April 24, 1997.

Respectfully Submitted

Steve Hirby