A health check for university use of the web in Spain

Abstract

The Web has become an important tool for universities, and one that is employed in a variety of ways. Examples are: disseminating and publicising research findings and activities; publishing teaching and administrative information for students; and collaborating with other institutions nationally and internationally. But how effectively are Spanish universities using the Web and what information can be gained about online communication patterns through the study of Web links? This paper reports on an investigation into 64 university Web sites that were indexed using a specialist information science Web crawler and analysed using associated software. There were a wide variety of sizes for university Web sites and that universities attracted links from others broadly in proportion to their site size. The Spanish academic Web was found to lag behind those of the four countries that it was compared to. However, the most commonly targeted top-level Internet domains were from non-Spanish speaking high Web using countries around the world, showing a broad international perspective and high degree of multilingualism for Web authors. The most highly targeted pages were mainly those that attracted automatically generated links, but several government ministries were a surprise inclusion.