WebWatching Academic Library Sites

Following on from UKOLN's analysis of public library websites we analysed 86 University and college library websites.

Figure 1 - Size of academic library web sites.

The average size of an academic library website is around 4.6 Mb. The histogram intervals in Figure 1 are 2Mb, so the chart indicates that most sites are less than 2Mb in total. The smallest site was around 4 Kb (consisting of one page). The largest was 133Mb (not shown in Figure 1 in order to keep the scale manageable). These figures include all resources (HTML, images and so on).

Academic library sites are larger than their public library counterparts and make greater use of web technologies, such as dynamically generated pages. Note that dynamically generated pages from four web sites were excluded from the analysis, due to a hyperlink recursion that was unsuitable for robot traversal.

A more detailed report will soon be available from the WebWatch web area.