Proposal for department "Web Editors"

Approved:

• April 24, 2007, GC-Web committee
• May 2007, Provost John Yordy

The GC-Web committee has been asked by the Provost to put together a plan to insure that department websites are all maintained to minimum standards which include:

• Visual consistency
• Up to date information
• Reference information which is judged to be strategically important to Goshen College to be available on the Web

Some but not all of these objectives can be met with centralized resources and publishing systems. This document deals with the de-centralized aspects of web publishing at Goshen College.

Having examined the process of web publishing at Goshen College, the GC-Web committee recommends that each department designate at least one person as their "Web Editor".

Web publishing at Goshen College

The GC Website hosts 10s of thousands of files, and gets more than 10 million file requests each month. Many of our current and prospective students and alumni probably look first to our website for any Goshen College-related information.

Every organization struggles with keeping web information:

• current and up-to-date,
• relevant to people's needs and interests,
• visually compelling and consistent across the site.

We have a handful of professionals who know their HTML from their MHL. But we can't keep it up alone, and never have. Our website has always received significant content contributions from the whole campus community:

• Students blogging the Men's Chorus trip,
• Pictures and updates from SST leaders,
• MQR content and indices,
• Book searches and reference info from the Library,
• Marge Brandeberry editing directory information,
• Resources linked to from across the whole Web for teaching art to children, fetal pig dissection guides, and other content coming out of faculty teaching activity.
• Could go on and on!

With tools such as Caravel content management, blogs, Moodle, and our event calendar, we feel that Goshen College now has a great technology infrastructure to enable collaboration between our central web design team and content experts--department web editors--who need only modest web production expertise.

With this technology infrastructure in place, we feel that a relatively modest investment in training and coordination of this group of web editors can have a big strategic payoff in terms of the quantity and quality of information available on the Goshen College website.

Duties and responsibilities of  the department Web Editors

• Receive training or otherwise achieve competency in using Caravel to the level of:
  • Making changes to existing pages: logging in, editing, and "publishing" pages.
    
  • Creating new pages with text and images.
    
    
• Make routine updates to your department's website.
  
  
• Review their own departmental website quarterly to check for out-of-date content, and content that ought to be either on their website or linked to from their website.
  
  
• Join a listserv/forum 'web-editors' for peer support and the support from the GCWeb development team ('arachnid@goshen.edu') with issues of web publishing communication.
  
  
• Willingness to be a first contact in their department for web publishing questions from other faculty/staff in the department.
  
  
• Identify recurring publishing tasks for your department, and work with the web development team at ways to simplify them.

Support of this initiative

PR and ITS will support this initiative by:

• Offering web publishing training at least once per semester for either groups or individuals.
  
  
• Training ITS helpdesk STAs (Student Technology Assistants) to the basic Caravel skills outlined above.
  
  
• Creating and updating training materials on the web and in printable form.
  
  
• Participating in and enabling the listserv/forum.
  
  
• Using this network of individuals to identify and prioritize the next generation of web publishing system tools.