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Academic Examples of WWW Servers

For this chapter, we unashamedly chose an academic example, our own server, which can be found at http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/.

We also have a quick look at the UK's Open Government server run by the CCTA at http://www.open.gov.uk/ the Natural History Museum at http://www.nhm.ac.uk/ and the Royal Horticultural Society's server at Kew: http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/ for political, historical and natural reasons.

The extended example taken is the attempt to setup a coherent WWW service for the authors' department'sgif educational needs.

We use this to illustrate several points:

Firstly, schools and universities make their income primarily from doing the business of teaching. Hence advertising what they do effectively using WWW (and any other cost/effective means available) is essential to reach potential students. Secondly, universities conduct basic research, which is usually pre-competitive, and therefore in the public's strong interest to be made as available as possible. In fact, in the UK,. Universities are assessed and partly funded on their publication record. Lastly, the WWW can be used as a single source for coordinating administrative information, keeping inaccurate or out of date copies to a minimum, and saving immense amounts of paper!

Socially, access to information about education can only be an advantage.

A key fact to remember about an academic community is that it is very hard to impose a single word processing standard on its members. In these examples, source material was prepared using packages as diverse as Framemaker, Word Perfect, Nroff, LaTeX and Macdraw.

Notes also on style and maintenance





next up previous contents
Next: Syllabi/Course Administration Up: The World Wide Web Previous: Where are we



Jon Crowcroft
Wed May 10 11:46:29 BST 1995