Thesis

The Web Development Department will be documenting our work here.

We wanted to have a venue to explain to our colleagues some of the less-visible parts of our work in Web Development; the challenges we face that, if we do our job well, no one will ever notice. So, if all goes according to plan, you'll see here explanations of some of the work we do with servers, networking, coding standards, and configuration. We will do our best to make it comprehensible and interesting for the lay reader. We work hard on these projects and are proud of our work.

We also wanted to provide a regular stream of updates on projects that will be very visible to Libraries staff and to our users. Our department has been rebuilding over the past nine months, and now that we are fully staffed, we are eager to move quickly to make necessary improvements to our sites and services. We want feedback and input, and while we'll be diligent in keeping the Web Presence Management Group informed, and will take every opportunity to get in front of staff with updates, we also wanted to provide a place where you will always be able to get a sense of where our projects stand.

Related to the rebuilding of our department, we also wanted this work log to be a place where we can articulate some of the principles that drive our work, why we as a department work the way we do. Our department is a work in progress, and we're still experimenting with tools and techniques for communication and collaboration. Hopefully this work log will also provide an opportunity for you to get to know each of us, our areas of interest and expertise.

Finally, it is our hope that building in to each of our projects an expectation for regular public communication here will provide us in the department an opportunity for reflection, another chance to ponder how our day-to-day work intersects with the work of our colleagues in the Libraries and of scholars at the University.