UCISA User Services Conference - April 2002Brian Kelly (UKOLN) ran two workshop sessions at the UCISA User Services Conference 2002 on The 24hr University: Stretching the Limits which took place at the University of Leeds on 8-10th April 2002.
A session on Disseminating News Within Your Organisation took place on Monday 8th April from 3:45-4:45 pm. See the further information.
A session on Benchmarking Your IT Services Web Site took place on Wednesday 10th April from 11:00-12:00 am. See the further information.
This hands-on workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to benchmark their departmental Web site by evaluating various aspects of their Web site and making comparisons with comparable Web sites within the HE/FE sector.
Exercises which will be attempted will include evaluation of the accessibility and compliance with standards for key resources on their Web sites, linkages to the Web site, performance monitoring, etc.
Participants will be provided with a set of exercises. Participants will be able to make use of the exercises once they return to their institution.
The advantages and disadvantages of this approach to benchmarking Web sites will be discussed.
The workshop is a interactive one, and participants will make use of a number of Web tools and utilities.
This hands-on workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to explore techniques which can be used to provide automated news feeds. This can be useful for disseminating news information (IT services news or institutional news) in an automated way, which avoids the dangers of providing out-of-date news which often happens when manual approaches are taken.
Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus, a national, JISC-funded Web coordination post based at UKOLN, University of Bath. His responsibilities include monitoring Web developments, information dissemination, providing advice and representing JISC on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Dissemination of information on Web developments is one of the important aspects of Brian's responsibilities. In addition to organising the annual Web Management workshop and participation at many events, Brian publishes articles in a variety of publications, including the Ariadne, Cultivate Interactive and Exploit Interactive e-journals.
In the days before the Web Brian was an Information Officer in the IT Services department at the Universities of Liverpool (1990-91) followed by Leeds (1991-95). He was active in the IUIC (Inter-University Information Committee) - the predecessor to UCISA's TLIG group.