STAFFING

Dedicate staff resources as well as computer resources to your HTTP server initiatives.*

As stated previously, bringing up an HTTP server is easy. The hard part is maintaining it. This requires staff. If you plan to provide HTTP services, then plan for staff to manage them.

The World Wide Web is primarily a communications medium. For it to be most effective, it requires the skills of various professions. These skills include:

• computer networking and administration
• copy editing
• graphic design and illustration
• information collection and organization
• programing
• writing

The ideal solution is to create a new department (a "Web Publishing Unit") and hire experts in each of the areas above to provide your HTTP services. A more practical approach would be to pull staff from existing departments who posses the needed skills and have these people work as a team.

At the very least, you will want your team to include:

• 1 graphic artist who understands HTML and illustration
• 1 editor who creates and modifies content
• 1 computer programmer/administrator who keep the machine running smoothly

HTTP services do not exist in a vacuum. It will be paramount for your Web Publishing Unit to communicate with other staff and its constituency. Therefore you might want to have a "Web Board" with liasons from each of your institution's departments. These people will bring to the table issues for implementation as well as content for your server.

Disadvantages

This model is not without its problems. First, you might not have the monetary resources to create a free standing unit responsible for server maintenance.

Second, this model would need to be created from scratch and it would not necessarily fit neatly into your current organizational structure. It would mean another hierarchy of some sort for staff to traverse.

Advantages

There are a number of advantages to this model. First, a freestanding unit like this one with several levels of expertise would assure the consistency and quality of the content while distributing the functions across several staff each with important and different roles.

Second, having a centralized unit would allow for the efficient purchase and use of highly specialized software: authoring tools, analysis software, graphic support equipment, link checkers, etc. Other staff throughout the library could concentrate on developing Web content themselves, discovering and helping disseminate other resources, connecting with faculty or other partners for collaborative opportunities and more, all without having to learn the tools in question. This is not unlike your current organizational structure which leaves certain tasks to a cadre of specialized staff with whom others interact in a known workflow.

Third, to say HTTP services represent a powerful communication medium is an understatement. The ever-increasing importance of the HTTP services to your institution's mission requires full-time commitment for the identical reasons that units such as reference, circulation, cataloging, and acquisitions do. Staying current with Web technologies, supervising staff assistants, interacting with staff and users, and pursuing the your institution vision are not elements to be passed on to either a committee or made partial responsibilities in an already existing job.

* This section borrows heavily from the NCSU Libraries internal document Eric Morgan, Keith Morgan, and Doris Sigl, "Taming the Web: Structured Web Management in the NCSU Libraries" June 1996.