WebTeam -- University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio

Minutes (June 21, 2007) Web Advisory Committee

Present: Dr. Alison Beck, Lydia Leos, Dr. Keith Krolick, Dr. Ivon Foster, Gilbert Sosa, Alan Miller, Doug Hartzler, Debbie Valle, Anna Dorrycott, Kat Myers, Ida Garcia, Dr. Nedal Arar, Tim Presley, Dr. Sara Gill, Katie Prentice, Sean McGee, Roseanne Hurst, Heather Cura, Mary Yanes, and Jim Barrett.

The chair, Dr. Alison Beck, called the meeting to order. Committee members approved the April 20 minutes. Jim Barrett gave the webmaster's report. He said:

Server traffic in May declined 11 percent, to 2 million page views, over the same month in 2006.
A non-uthscsa.edu web-site publisher requested adding a Perl script to allow his site to bill using PayPal services. Mr. Barrett said the Information Security Office would examine the script, and systems analysts would try to determine whether the script would have any adverse effect on the web server.
He attended a meeting of University of Texas webmasters in May in Austin. Two components, Mr. Barrett said, have purchased a product from Watchfire, a software vendor, that validates web coding for security and accessibility. He said both components praised the software, and said it allows individual web-site publishers to examine the results, and make corrections if needed.
Starting July 9, the Office of External Affairs plans to begin posting and managing internal news that will appear on the sign-in page of the portal, inside.uthscsa.edu. He said the office plans to use the portal as a primary outlet for internal news.

In new business, Mr. Barrett summarized the results of a web-accessibility validation he conducted earlier in June. He said he validated 59 pages that are linked from the university homepage. Mr. Barrett said most pages did well. The pages were evaluated to see whether they properly:

Used meta tags
Used "alt" tags
Functioned without relying on scripts
Identified the page’s publisher
Handled frames
Worked without cascading stylesheets

Mr. Barrett said he would validate the same pages for other accessibility functions next year. Dr. Nedal Arar asked if there is a way to use the validation to identify web pages with outdated information.

In other new business, Mr. Barrett asked the members for advice about providing a central weblog, or "blog," server. The discussion covered many aspects, including uses of blogs for classroom instruction, internal news distribution, and student groups.

The library hosts and uses a blog internally as an alternative to email, Katie Prentice said. The School of Medicine is planning to use outside blog hosts to distribute Podcasts for students, Tim Presley said. Two student groups also have opted to use outside hosting for blogs, said Roseanne Hurst.

A centralized blog server may not be competitive with outside blog services because many of the outside services are free, Mr. Presley said. Mr. Barrett said the university probably would need to charge a fee to host a blog.

Mr. Barrett said he would take the information to an internal working group that is discussing whether there is a need for a centrally hosted blog server.

There was no other business, and the meeting was adjourned.

-- Minutes prepared by Mary Yanes
-- Approved Aug. 2, 2007