David F. Flanders (JISC Programme Manager responsible for persistent
identifiers) and Joss Winn (Project Manager of the JISC-funded ‘Linking
You Toolkit’) have written a blog post in which they invite feedback on
potential future work that JISC would like to take forward on behalf of
the sector.
In brief the proposal is based on deploy ideas from the Linking You
project more widely across the sector. This is aimed at providing the
following benefits:
*Better SEO*: As a sector we can go to Google and say, “Hi we are the
University sector and we think you should give priority to these URLs
when people are searching for things like courses.”
*Improve discovery*: Clear human-readableURLs are now integral to
browser search and lookup technology
<http://linkingyou.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2011/04/18/the-evolution-of-the-address-bar/>and
becoming essential if you want to enable ease by a student experiencing
your website.
*Predictable, consistent, aggregations*: It will be easier to build
tools on behalf of the entire sector because people will know where to
go for the data.
*Provision of a course catalogue*: As many of you knowJISC is actively
encouraging universities to create XCRI feeds for their courses
<http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/funding_calls/2011/07/coursedata>.
If everyone producing an XCRI feed put it at the following URL
http://www./foo/.ac.uk/courses/xcri/ we’d lay the groundwork for
persistent, structured course data that developers (many of them
students) could use to build new and engaging apps and websites that we
could all benefit from.
*Provision of news feed aggregators*: If we all knew where all the
corporate news feeds were e.g. http://foo.ac.uk/news/rss we could create
a UK University News Aggregation Service where the sector could have
their news published on demand, let alone text mining goodness and other
filters for highlight key news developments across all higher and
further education institutions.
*A sector wide directory*: Common information such as institutional
policies, contact information, news, about, events, etc. could be
aggregated into a searchable directory; useful to both the public and
HEI data geeks.
*Managing your assets*: Your .ac.uk addresses can be understood as your
‘virtual real estate’. Adopting a well-formed, widely understood and
persistent ‘portfolio’ of core web addresses will help University Web
Managers manage these increasingly valuable assets.
*A simple mapping tool*: An apache mod_rewrite (or IIS, nginx, etc.
equivalent) tool that will do most of this work for you that could be
written once and support many!
*Management of robot.txt files*: If a group of Universities started
adopting these URL syntaxes, we could save time and money by generating
a common robot.txt for all of us so to use so we don’t have to each
write a robot.tx file, this would also make doing analytics across the
sector enhanced as we could understand patters of clicking across all
.ac.uk websites.
More information is available at:
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/guest-post-lend-me-your-ears-dear-university-web-managers/
Is this something that institutional Web managers would welcome? What
barriers might be envisaged?
JISC are thinking of funding several short projects to review and
standardise the toolkit, put it into practice and then write up the case
studies for the sector on how it worked for you and what value you see
in doing this work. Are you interested? What are your thoughts on all of
this?
Thanks
Brian
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Brian Kelly
UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, UK, BA2 7AY
Email: [log in to unmask]
Blog: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/briankelly
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