Doctoral Universities offer a full range of bacalaureate programs and are committed to graduate education through the doctorate. Doctoral I institutions award at least 40 doctoral degrees annually in five or more disciplines, while Doctoral II institutions award at least 10 doctoral degrees in three or more disciplines, or 20 or more doctoral degrees in one or more disciplines each year.
The survey of 447 college and university WWW sites included 79 sites of doctoral universitites, with both good and poor examples. As a group, these institutions represented the second largest group of institutions on the WWW - 79 of 111 universities (71.1 percent) had developed sites. Of these, there were 33 Doctoral I institutions (64.7 percent) and 46 Doctoral II institutions.
Who created the site?
Overall, it was difficult to tell who created these sites or whether the campus-wide information server (CWIS) was the primary Webmaster. At sites where the author was known, most were developed by the Academic Computing departments, however there were quite a few developed by individual departments or colleges. We found a total of 34 sites whose CWIS was the primary Webmaster, which accounts for 43% of all Doctoral university sites.
What type of information is offered?
The survey documented what type of information was offered at each site. We created eight categories to synthesize and compare this information:
Only 30 percent of doctoral institutions provided information about admissions, which is a similar percentage reported by the other types of institutions with WWW sites. It was disappointing to find only 8 doctoral university sites with information from the public affairs/public relations offices and for alumnae.
What directory services are available?
The services identified in the survey included a directory of faculty and students (white pages), a directory of home pages, and a campus map. As a group, doctoral universities were strong in providing a directory service to find faculty, students and administrators. Fifty institutions (63 percent) offered white pages services. Individual home pages were less in number - only 26 institutions offered a service to locate these. And campus maps were also fewer in comparison to other types of institutions with web sites. Only 9 Doctoral I institutions and 18 Doctoral II institutions had a campus map available.
What qualities of hypermedia exist?
We imposed a rating system to evaluate the level of hypermedia in our survey and found that the majority of Doctoral institutions were using a moderate amount; photos were popular, as was the "mail to" feature, but few used clickable maps or forms and no online applications were offered.
last updated: May 22, 1995