Thursday March 22nd 2007

We went over the conclusion of the article on College and University websites.   

Conclusion and Future Remarks

 The study of all college and university websites on Long Island and a sampling of some non-Long Island institutions indicate that there has been lack of quality assurance testing to assure the accuracy of information and quality of presentation. The finding of the study has been based on the examination of 7 layers and 7X2 C’s web analysis criteria especially in the area of search engine layer.  These web layers are from school identity, appearance, search engine, HTML, script programming, to server data base manipulation, and security, privacy and ethic.  The web analysis criteria known as 7X2 C’s are range from content, correctness, completeness  to currency, consistency and compelling.   A college web site should consider a quality test plan in these 49 areas. The study recommends that due to the importance of search engine to locate accurate information, a college search engine should prioritize its search on the official web page of the institution based on the most important entries and personnel which are limited.   The search engine should look for the entire entry on the official institution site only. When there is no match found, the search engine should use some intelligence and do a partial search to locate the desired entry.  Use of commercial search engines on college web pages provides an overwhelming amount of results that may be irrelevant.  Future studies are needed to analyze more web sites and involve more colleges and universities nation or world wide and create a profile for each of these schools based on each of the seven layers and 7x2 C’s analysis.  Although the purpose of this study was not to compare Long Island institutions to other institutions, a finding reveals that all non-Long Island colleges and universities including Ivy League schools in this study were using Google in combination with the in-house search.  A question arises as to whether or not choosing a specific search provider such as Google will affects the neutrality of the net as well as academia?