This survey of college and university WWW sites was conducted from the sites listed in the American Universities site produced by Christina DeMello at MIT. Institutions are added to this list periodically and it became impossible for us to keep our list up-to-date. The list from which the survey was conducted included the 489 institutions that were present on the American Universities WWW site list in March, 1995.
Method: The survey was conducted by four graduate students studying computer-mediated communication at Teachers College, Columbia University. The list of institutions was divided among the students and visits were made to every site. A questionnaire was developed by the group to aid in obtaining information from each site, but a time limit of 3-5 minutes for each visit was imposed to reflect the limited attention span of many WWW surfers. Only the information that was easily and quickly obtained is reflected in the survey.
Results: A summary of the survey findings is provided below, however, a more detailed analysis of specific types of institutions can be found by clicking on one of the six separate sections below:
Of the 489 colleges surveyed, 447 were listed in the Carnegie classifications and seven were associations of higher education systems. The statistics calculated for this site regarding the survey findings are based on those institutions recognized by the Carnegie Foundation, as reported in the 1994 Technical Report.
Nearly half of the WWW sites were created by the Academic Computing departments (212 of 447 institutions) and almost as many (218) rely on the campus-wide information server (CWIS) as the primary Webmaster. Other Webmasters included the Computer Science department (9), the Admissions office (9), the Library (7), the Mathematics department (3) and the Public Relations office (1). A few institutions (6) had persued their WWW site with a committee comprised of library, public relations, academic computing, and other professional computing staff, while others (2) were developed by a lone individual who was pecking out HTML in a corner office.
The types of information colleges and universities offer their visitors varies with the type of institution (see links above), but the most common piece was a section that provided general information about the institution. Seventy-two percent of the institutions had such a section, which, despite the popularity, shows that there are a considerable amount of institutions with WWW sites that lack general introductory information. Other common elements included library access (57%), information about specific departments, schools or colleges (55%), and general information about academic programs and schedules (49%). Information from the public affairs/public relations and alumni offices were the least common.
Directory services (white pages) of faculty, staff and students were available on half of the sites, but directories of home pages and campus maps were less common (35 and 32 percent respectively).
We reviewed elements of hypermedia to determine how comprehensive college and university sites were. A few specific elements were evident in these sites: 159 sites had photos, 96 included the "mail to" feature, and 54 had clickable maps. Furthermore, a handful had online applications, audio or quick-time movies.
last updated: May 22, 1995