Managing Your Institutional Web GatewayA workshop session on Managing Your Institutional Web Gateway was given at the JANET User Support Workshop held at the University of Plymouth on 14-16th September 1999.
The workshop session itself will took place on Wednesday 15 September from 16.00-17.30. It included presentations, hands-on exercises and group discussions.
Many institutions provide an Internet gateway (sometime called "portal") on their web site which provides links to a variety of Internet resources. In many institutions it is likely that this gateway initially consisted of a set of links to the most popular net resources such as search engines, JISC services such as the NISS gateway and perhaps popular web sites such as the BBC. However when considering the growth and ongoing maintenance of the gateway, the maintainer of the gateway finds themself facing facing an ever-grpowing set of questions and issues. For example:
The session will consist of brief presentations, demonstrations and group exercises. The session will be led by Brian Kelly (UKOLN, University of Bath) and Phil Cross (ILRT, University of Bristol).
This workshop session uses the following exercises:
Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus, a national, JISC-funded web coordination post based at UKOLN (UK Office For Library and Information Networking), University of Bath.
Brian has been involved in the development of web services since early 1993 - the web service he supported at Leeds University was one of the first 30 organisational web services available. As most Universities at the time were convinced that Gopher was the most appropriate technology for distributed information systems, between 1993 and 1995 Brian (who was worried that he may have chosen the Internet equivalent of the Betamax system!) gave presentations about the Web thoughout the UK.
In 1995 Brian joined the Netskills project at Newcastle University where he was involved in development of network training material.
In November 1996 Brian took up his current post in Bath. His responsibilities include monitoring web developments, information dissemination, providing advice and representing JISC on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Brian presented a poster at the WWW 8 conference. He has attended WWW conferences at Toronto (WWW8, May 1999), Brisbane (WWW7, April 1998), Santa Clara (WWW6, April 1997), Paris (WWW5, May, 1996) and Geneva (WWW1, May 1994).
Phil Cross has been with the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) at Bristol University for two years. He is involved with the running of the Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG at http://www.sosig.ac.uk/) and the European project DESIRE. SOSIG is one of the longest running 'Subject Gateways', which use the skills of information professionals to select and catalogue quality Internet resources for the UK academic research community. The DESIRE project involves collaboration between project partners from across Europe and focuses on enhancing information networks for research users through caching, resource discovery and directory services.
Before obtaining an MSc in Information Technology and working for the ILRT, Phil worked for a number of years as an academic librarian, specialising in the application of information technology for information retrieval.