In the Background

In between attending this year’s High Ed Web conference (Mark Greenfield’s ‘The Kids are Alright’ session and a subsequent UNL-Greenfield conversation on the airport shuttle created a particular itch in my brain), picking up a new copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto at Mark’s urging (the 10th Anniversary Edition has been rewritten and recalibrated), and conducting last night’s focus group (along with Seth Meranda and Meg Lauerman), I am more convinced than ever that we are out of step with the students we are here to serve.

Institutions Care About Different Things Than Users Do.

Where does the institution perceive value in an online environment? For too long, the institutional point of view has trumped the user perspective when considering the overall perceived value of the software platforms that make a university go. “This is where the data goes” is more important, seemingly, than “this is how the user experiences her interaction with the data.” For many of the academic enterprise’s administrative systems, the systems that manage financials, student information, hiring, etc., it doesn’t matter so much. Because many of those systems’ users are employees. While substandard UIs might affect their productivity and job satisfaction, and may cost the university in terms of lost efficiency, employees are more likely to value their paycheck over the annoyances of bad interface and experience.

Broadly, those experiences with substandard interfaces result in employees who, in the end, don’t expect much from user experience. That would be sad enough in itself, but for its unintended consequence: decisionmaking bodies composed of people with low expectations for user experience tend to breed more systems with bad, even user-hostile, user experience. Restated, substantially all of the people in decisionmaking positions regarding computer systems in the university are employees who are used to wrestling with the often-byzantine user experiences of our enterprise apps. Is it a stretch to suppose that all of the figurative toe-stubbing endured dealing with those systems over the years has left most of the decision-makers a bit exhausted, perhaps jaded where online user experience is concerned?

Students expect more and they expect better. And it’s not because they’re cranky.

Our university’s fundamental mission of education involves engagement with a user population that is dramatically different where their user experience expectations are concerned. They have very high expectations, and they are not casual about them. What is expected is expected, and if it is not there, that unfulfilled expectation turns to disappointment.

Consider that incoming students in the fall of 2009 were already born when the web was invented. Their favorite games as children were likely played on computers, through engrossing and fanciful user experiences that rewarded exploration. Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, was spreading around the net before they reached kindergarten. The ‘net is not a second language to them. To them, the Internet is and has always been. They have used computers, have communicated and interacted through computers, all of their lives.

The powerful upshot of all of this is that not only do they respond to what’s presented in a focus group, they know what’s possible (or, at least, what should be possible). They instinctively ‘get’ that data can come from multiple sources and be presented in a single optimized interface. Every day, they see it happen across their data landscape, with YouTube videos showing up in Facebook, mashups between Flickr and Google Maps, and on and on. And not only do they know what’s possible, they know what they want, and they recognize the sometimes huge gaps between what they want and know is possible and what they have. It’s the “can’t have it” gap.

In last night’s focus group session, students described the schizophrenic process required each semester to simply continue their enrollment at the university. One described the three windows that he, every enrollment period, painstakingly arranged on his computer screen. On the left, a display of his degree audit report. At center, the PDF of the undergraduate bulletin. On the right, the Schedule of Classes. Copying and pasting data between all three, preparing a list of call numbers to be entered into the enrollment system at the designated hour of 8 a.m. It was no surprise when the entire group responded to the question “should we integrate all of this?” with a resounding “yes!”

Every focus group yields good intel; you invariably leave smarter than you arrived. But last night’s was remarkable for its yield of Things We Hadn’t Thought of Yet. One student spoke up and asked if he could have a weekly calendar displayed, blocking out the various course times as they selected them in the Schedule of Classes. An honors student wanted the system to know, by user authentication, that she was an honors student, and to highlight Honors sections. All wanted ACE (Achievement-Centered Education) data to be pulled in and displayed alongside the course descriptions. Students want that data integrated, presented friction-free in one interface. They expect us to bring it to the surface. They don’t care that it comes from seven or eight different databases likely run by the same number of university departments. They don’t care about that at all.

For now we’ll deliver all that is within our control to deliver for Undergraduate Bulletin 1.0. There is a gap between that first generation of the Undergrad Bulletin online, to launch in late spring 2010, and the second version that would integrate data into an optimized user experience. It’s the difference between what we envision and where our systems are now, what departments “own” the relevant data and  who they trust to display it.

The “can’t have it gap” is a vulnerability. Because while it persists, there are others that are delivering. How much quality user experience affects recruitment and retention is anyone’s guess. But until we meet students’ expectations across a whole range of user experience of which the enrollment process is but a small part, we are vulnerable by comparison to competitive institutions and enterprises that have a comprehensive strategy to optimize their online student experience.

A friend of Doc Searls’ gave The Cluetrain Manifesto its title with this quote, about a Silicon Valley tech company that had fallen on hard times: “The clue train stopped there four times a day, and they never took delivery.”

The University of Phoenix now has 420,000 students, up 22 percent over last year.

The report, to those involved in the day-to-day work of creating and publishing content on a university website, is probably not all that surprising. But there’s a big difference between opinion and facts in our discussions with those who control budgets and therefore the mix of media carrying our messages to prospective students. Facts, in audience research terms, require adequate sample sizes (1000 in this study) and sound methodology, such that one can say with confidence that a given result would be repeated if the study were repeated. I’ll highlight a few of those facts in the paragraphs to follow, and what they might mean for the continuing development of the UNL website.

First, as the title of the paper suggests, the idea that users don’t read long-form text online, repeated so often that it’s attained a Gospel status, is debunked, at least for this audience. Please, read on.

79 percent of respondents said they would “read it all, even scroll,” to see the information on admissions details and deadlines on a university website. 80 percent said that content (”the content presented on a college or university Web site is more important than how it looks”) is more important than design (”the look and feel of a school site is more important than what I find to read”).

Second, the content has to be correct, helpful and up-to-date … 57 percent of respondents at the prospect stage said they would, in fact, probably take a school off their list if the content was “out of date, incorrect, or unhelpful.”

On social networking, students were generally receptive to schools’ involvement in social media, with 70 percent saying that schools should maintain presences within existing social media sites like Facebook, and 75 percent saying that schools should create their own private social networks for invited students (insert plug here for Smart Site Social, a UNL-focused social framework currently under development in University Communications).

I’ve intentionally left out many interesting though less-emphatic percentages, because it’s difficult to say that some of those things are true without caveats. For instance, do prospectives want recruiters to contact them through social media? 51 percent say “yes,” but 46 percent say “no.” That may not be a risk worth taking.

Informal Communications=Web, Formal=Mail?
There’s a table on page 7 of the study, titled ‘Preferred methods for communications,” that I interpret to mean that prospectives want something tangible delivered in the mail if the communication is very important, such as notification of a financial aid award or acceptance. For most other things, including communicating with current students and communicating with faculty, there is a significant preference for online methods. Most interestingly, to me, is the breakdown on the communication task “getting answers to my questions.” 34 percent prefer to use online methods for that broadly general purpose, and another 60 percent prefer in-person or telephone communications, presumably interpreting the communication task indicated by the question as more personal and unique. Only four percent said they preferred to “get answers to my questions” via mail.

There’s more here of interest, and I invite you to read: Scrolling Toward Enrollment: Web Site Content and the E-Expectations of College-Bound Seniors

There are basically five areas that make up most of the primary navigation color coded as follows:

Red text - About the College/General Information
Green text - Students
Blue text - Faculty and Staff
Purple text - Departmental Info/Centers and Programs
Orange text - Alumni

The departments are listed first in alphabetical order showing their main navigation links color coded from the above list. Then the main areas (About, Students, etc.) are presented showing all the various sublinks that are found among all the colleges to show an all encompassing list of what everyone currently has down to the sublink navigation level.

Finally, at the very bottom of the document are a few miscellaneous primary navigation items that are unique to one or two colleges each.

Hopefully, by analyzing this information colleges and perhaps departments can use it to make decisions to help create more consistency with colleagues across campus. The goal being to create intuitive navigation structures that users are able to grasp quickly when moving between various colleges and departments within the UNL web environment.

As these things go, though, not everyone who is interested in the subject can show up to a given meeting, and a number of university faculty, staff and students are simply out of town for the summer. So I’ve made the presentation available here as an MP4 video (complete with stammering narration). Thanks for your interest, and I look forward to your continuing engagement in the development of UNL.edu.

The “Design Survey” and “UNL.edu and You” were programmed to move seamlessly from an internally-developed instrument to the LimeSurvey-based UNL.edu and You (thanks, Brett); users simply kept clicking through. The significant interest in the redesign process translated to a strong response to UNL.edu and You that we may not have been able to attract otherwise; nearly 4,000 people ended up completing both surveys.

Surveys of this type are not a “vote;” they’re an opportunity for users to provide input to, and influence, a group of professionals from across campus whose expertise lies in communication, visual design and user interface and interaction design. The survey was intended to provide focus to the final ‘leg’ of the journey from 50 designs to one … the distillation of best elements from three designs to one design over the span of a single month.

Qualitative results, especially, had to be interpreted, as there are almost as many conflicting opinions as there are opinions. It was the first order of business for the final design team to identify broad themes in the qualitative responses.

It was the job of the design committee to discuss, argue and implement (yes, in some cases also reject) those opinions. Whether or not a UNL.edu and You respondent sees a specific response to their issue in the final design, the feedback led to spirited debate and discussion that in all cases improved the final product. If you took the time and effort to provide feedback to us, thank you.

Design Quantitative
Design Qualitative
UNL.edu and You

Let’s See the New Template!

The visual design of the 2009 UNL.edu template in the default state.

From the Top

• In the top left corner is the “N,” roughly the same size as in our current design. However, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln title is much larger and more prominent.
• In the upper right corner is a much larger search box. We have also removed the option to select the type of search to handle, and will replace with a results page that incorporates search results from unl.edu, peoplefinder and the local site. The idea is to create one simple interface element to use when searching the site.
• Immediately below the search box is a row of icons. The muted-in-color icons serve as links to site-wide resources (in order): RSS Links, current weather, the event calendar, peoplefinder and the public webcams. When the mouse rolls over these icons, they will be presented in color with little help “balloons” describing each element. Clicking on these will bring available the selected resource.
• Perhaps the largest advancement from our current site is the display of the navigation. The new design brings together the multiple navigation schemes present on any page and places them in a single, efficient and compartmentalized section. More on the functionality of the navigation below.
• Below the navigation, is a full-width, four-column content section. This area is reserved for the most important elements of the page, and is available to the developers to present in the fashion their users most need. Content area resources will be available for developers.
• The last section of the page is an extended footer. This is reserved for site-wide content that can be found on every page (related links, promotional items, contact information, etc…)

How does the Navigation Work?

The navigation on this template has been streamlined into one, easy-to-use element. What previously represented four separate navigational areas, has been combined and organized at the top of the page.

The navigation starts with the breadcrumbs/site hierarchy. For instance, on the image below, the red bar shows UNL > Admissions. The navigation displayed is for the Admissions department, as it is the current site our user is on.

The tab visual indicator is used to show which site the navigation belongs to.

At this point, our user can move her mouse over any of the Admissions links and by doing so, open a full drawer of all the links for the Admissions department:

This drawer will overlay the content and will disappear when she moves her mouse off. She can use any link in the drawer.

If our user would like to keep the navigation displayed at all times, across all sites on UNL.edu during every visit, she can opt to select the link at the bottom of the drawer that says: “click to always show full navigation.” (note, this wording may change based on user-testing). By selecting this option, the navigation will always be displayed, and the content will be pulled out from underneath the drawer:

Upon doing this, the link at the bottom of the drawer will change to: “click to always hide full navigation,” allowing our user to change her preference at any time.

In addition, this navigation element allows for added functionality. Our user also has the option to mouse over “UNL” in the red bar, and the navigation in the drawer will refresh with the navigation found on unl.edu, giving her quick access to the global navigation. Each site in the breadcrumb area (the red bar) will have the ability to showcase its primary navigation. For instance, if our user is on the “Accounting” site, her breadcrumb area would be laid out as: UNL > College of Business Administration > Accounting. By default she would have the Accounting site’s navigation, but a mouse over “College of Business Administration” will present CBA’s navigation, and a mouse over of “UNL” will present the global UNL navigation.

Final Thoughts

The new template adds the most real estate available to the content, while also streamlining hierarchy and efficiency through the compartmentalized navigation element. For more examples of the new template, check out the bulletin board post.

The process of coding this template into a workable page is underway. In order to help our users get to know the new template, we will be providing resources over the next few months that will allow our users to learn more and play with the future of UNL.edu.

Related Posts

• The UNL Template Design Process
• All Paths Lead Forward
• Achieving a New Balance

As a reader of this blog, you are aware that the Web Developers Network is in the process of realigning UNL.edu with a face lift. Aaron has explained much of the process in his previous post, and I won’t rehash his descriptions. Instead, I’d like to take you on a journey of how the knowledge gained from the research went into the future design.

As you may recall, at the end of March, we began gathering survey data designed to capture specific information regarding our current audiences’ use of the internet in general, their thoughts and expectations of UNL.edu currently, and their reactions and impressions of three possible design candidates. In addition, over the past 9 months, data has been gathered through site-wide web analytics, from discussions with students, faculty and staff, and from outside entities with specific understanding and knowledge of higher ed internet usage and design trends. Each of these have played a key role in determining the elements of the future design.

WDN Design Survey

This survey played a key role in determining the broad requirements of the realignment while also allowing the design team to distill the opportunities from the three design candidates into one future design.

On a broad level, several key findings either reinforced previous concerns of UNL.edu in its current form, or introduced new issues. This research identified the following major issues with UNL.edu:

• Our current navigation system is fractured. When it comes to navigating UNL.edu, most of users have a less than satisfactory time finding what they need. Many factors play into this, but from a design standpoint two main issue arose:
  1. The commas used as separators in the left-side navigation interferes with readability, ease of use and overall way-finding. In addition, the navigation hidden by the “more” button also contributes negatively.
  2. Multiple navigation systems exist on one page and confuse our users. For instance, if a user is on the Engineering department’s site, does she click on the “Prospective Student” link at the top of the page, or the “Prospective Student” link in the left-side navigation? Furthermore, if she then travels to the College of Business’s site, does she click on the “Prospective Student” link in the top right college navigation?
• Page hierarchy is difficult to understand, and in need of streamlining. For instance, a department’s title is on the same vertical level as the college’s navigation.

In addition to data specific to UNL.edu, many more discoveries of general internet usage have helped shape the path:

• Search is preferred over navigational systems
• Video usage is an expectation of positive usage experiences
• Visit other college and university web sites are not expectation setters of UNL.edu, instead expectations are set by everyday used sites like Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc…

The research also gathered impressions of the three design candidates. Going into this evaluation stage, it was understood that the future UNL.edu template would likely be dramatically different than any single proposed candidate. Therefore, this survey was designed to help us gather a consensus on look and feel and reactions (both positive and negative) on proposed elements. As a refresher, here are the three candidates:

What we learned from this portion of the survey:

• All three were very strong, with each receiving many positive reviews. In the end, the Group B design had the strongest visual structure.
• While the Group B design provided the look and feel most demanded, many elements from Group A & Group C were also favored strongly.
• Some audience members are passionate about their expectations of UNL.edu! (which is awesome)

The next step in the road was to use this information to distill each of the three designs into the future UNL.edu template. Tens of thousands of comments were read, evaluated and explored (often multiple times). Many of these comments provided excellent feedback that helped refine directions. It was up to the design team to take the feedback, and provide leadership into the future UNL.edu design.

Other Informing Sources

The WDN Survey wasn’t the only input into the direction of the future UNL.edu, nor will it be the final source of evaluation. Some key findings from other sources of research that have played a role in this design:

• On UNL.edu, when the top global navigation is used, 90% of usage is from 1 of the top 6 global pages. Of the remaining 10%, most usage is accidental (as mentioned in the above Prospective Students example). This means, that 99% of our pages do not need the global navigation displayed, and in fact it hinders user experience on many of these pages.
• Online videos are getting larger in size and higher in quality. Combined with an expectation of video usage for a rich user experience, we have the need for a full display stage.
• Access to content must be even quicker. Users are turning more to search, and ignoring the “chrome” of pages to quickly get to the primary reason for their visit.

The Distillation Process

The design group had the enormous task of taking the three well-received designs, combined with the various aggregation of direction-forming knowledge, and create one future UNL.edu template. The following image represents the visual distillation of the three designs into the future UNL.edu template:

As you can see, the final design incorporated elements from all three designs, with the encompassing vision and direction set forth by the Group B design:

• The header is a refinement and evolution of Group B.
• The navigation (more on navigation in a future post) is a hybrid of Group C in terms of functionality, but changed the row-based layout to a more readable column-based navigation.
• The content area brings in elements of all three designs, and offers the most flexibility possible, by utilizing the full width of the design.
• The footer improves the expanded element of Group C, and combines with the visual design of Group A.
• The outer shell, and the background for monitors wider than 1024 pixels is a direct evolution of the Group B design

So, What does this Design Provide?

The largest evolution in comparison to the current UNL.edu template is the navigation. As I mentioned before, the current template utilized multiple levels of navigation spread out across the page. This new design brings all the navigation elements into a single, compartmentalized structure. The navigation is now at the top of the page, and contributes to the solution for the visual hierarchy problem.

Above the navigation is a much more usable and prominent search box. Our research indicated users preferred search over navigation by an almost 2 to 1 margin.

Below the navigation is the full-width content area, a new feature that will allow for the ultimate display of video, web applications, and content.

Finally, the expanded footer allows for the consistent content found on all pages of a site.

The Improvements Won’t Stop

Even though the visual aspect is at the coding hand-off stage, on-going user testing will continue to be done in order to refine the design. Just as done before, many improvements will be made during the upcoming coding process, and updates will be done as needed after implementation.

Overall, the process has been very informative for all involved. Our users have provided valuable feedback along the way that has influenced the design up to this point. We expect our users to continue with this effort, and I’m always eager to learn more about our users needs — in fact, the new design will incorporate an element to provide feedback more quickly and easily.

Boiled down, the job of the web template is to assist the user in locating content while maintaining strong university identity. The navigational framework of a site, any site, is a supporting player. It has to be the best supporting player we can imagine, but in the end it should slip into the wings, and let the spotlight shine brightly on what the web user came to the site to see, to read, to experience: the content.

The case for horizontal/hidden navigation

NAVIGATION IS A MODAL ACTIVITY
Think about it: we may glance at a table of contents or an index to locate information in a book, but by itself, the reference to a chapter or index notation to a particular page carries no meaning, any more than a highway sign carries meaning. It’s a tool. It gets you there. Whenever we’re seeking something, online or off, navigation is a function that we access, and then we set aside in order to focus on whatever it was that we were seeking.

CONTENT IS KING
Content, now that’s where we find meaning. Content, it’s often said, is King. Content is the point of the exercise. We wouldn’t have a website at all if it weren’t an effective and efficient way to tell our story, share our information and interact with a mass audience. How do we know content is king (despite all of the posts online that argue the converse)? Because one thing we do know is that Google is God, and Google indexes what? Content.

FINITY AND BEYOND
Pixels are a finite commodity. There may be a lot of dots (pixels, or “picture elements”) on that screen that you’re staring at right now. Lots of dots that form a picture. However many dots there are, though, their number is limited. Designate more dots for one function, and there are less available for another function. Of particular relevance in this discussion: use more dots for navigation, there are less available for content. It’s a zero-sum game. And in that zero-sum game, content needs to be, MUST be, the number one priority.

HORIZONTAL/HIDDEN is an accepted standard navigational scheme. “Hidden” second levels of navigation are a well-accepted standard; they have been since complex systems were first designed. Not convinced? Look at your computer. Be it Windows, Mac or Linux, the main navigational elements are arranged at the top of the window (or in the case of the Mac, the screen), horizontally, left to right, with sublevels available on mouseover.

Even Google’s ultra-Spartan main page uses horizontal main/hidden secondary navigation. It’s the most-visited site on Earth, so this navigation choice doesn’t seem to have hurt them. Of course, the Google page isn’t really a content page, unless you consider a huge search box “content.” So YouTube, Facebook, the White House, and what the heck, a great university site: Stanford, all use some variation of horizontal/hidden. Facebook and YouTube reveal the secondary nav in the old-skool way, by navigating to the page that contains the secondary links. The White House drops menus on mouseover for each of its main navigational categories. Stanford uses a “show expanded menus/hide expanded menus” control to access secondary links. The Stanford menu itself is good, displaying everything in one fell swoop, but I do find myself wondering about the control implementation; it seems to rely entirely on users attending to and reading an instruction, instead of leveraging users’ intuition.

Google's main page: the most-visited (most successful?) web page of all; note the horizontal navigation with hidden secondary links.

PROGRESSIVE DISCLOSURE aids the discovery process by focusing the user on what’s important. “The very fact that something appears on the initial display tells users that it’s important,” says Jakob Nielsen, partner in Nielsen Norman Group, a leading web usability consultancy. Further, Nielsen says, “You might assume that by initially focusing users’ attention on a few core features, they might build a limiting mental model of the system and thus be unable to understand all of their options. Research says these are groundless worries: people understand a system better when you help them prioritize features and spend more time on the most important ones.” Typically, a site’s highest-priority links, either textual or graphical, will be featured in the page’s main content area; another argument in favor of giving the content area in any design the highest possible visual priority.

The Nielsen Norman Group has also done some study on what they term “mega drop-down navigation menus,” a type of navigation that describes the UNL.edu 2009 nav system. In short: beats flyout menus; works well.

USABILITY TESTING will determine which particular details become part of the overall user interaction on the UNL website navigational toolset. For instance, is it better to deliver the sub-navigation immediately on mouseover/hover, or is it better to add a delay to avoid “flashing” the navigational toolset when the user is simply mousing across the page, or is it better to require the user to click on the navigation to reveal the subnavigation? Is the norm of operating systems (all major OSes, in their current incarnations [Ubuntu/GNOME representing Linux for the sake of this discussion], require a mouse click to activate their submenus, rather than simply displaying them on hover) powerful enough to have built a user expectation of clicking before the secondary navigation is revealed?

TAXONOMY is the five-dollar word to describe what it is that goes into a navigation system. It’s the other part of a navigation system; what it contains (there’s that word again: contains; content). What is the information architecture? How is the content organized? It’s a part of the discussion we’ve never before addressed, and I’m pleased to announce that Roger Simonsen, College of Business Administration, will be leading a group of college and departmental web developers in this very important and interesting task. The outcome will be a “best practices,” a suggested outline for a college of university site. There are no illusions that there is a “cookie cutter” outline for a college or departmental site. But there are probably significant enough overlaps that it may make sense to attempt to “normalize” the user experience among sites … for instance, a generally-accepted position and phrasing for links to faculty pages might be one outcome. Thanks to Roger for taking on this task; you should begin to see communication on this subject within the WDN site over the coming months.

The process as a whole actually started clear back in September of 2008, as detailed in this post. At that time, developers across campus worked on photoshop file mock-ups of their proposed look and approximately 40 different looks were submitted. At a well-attended WDN meeting, we then ran voting that took into account both “gut response” (2 seconds viewing time) and more detailed comments for each design. After tabulating that data, 7 different designs stood apart from the rest. Click on the thumbnails below to see each of the beginning phase designs in full size.

These 7 designs were then pulled together into 3 different groups that incorporated similar ideas. Designers and other interested developers worked to further refine the ideas presented within each and ended up with the final designs that were voted on by different constituent groups in the WDN Design Survey. Needless to say, each design changed considerably from where it started. Again, click on the thumbnails below to see the design in full size.

The resulting feedback from the WDN Design Survey was incredible. We received over 8000 full responses, providing us not only quantitative data to go on, but qualitative responses to help guide us as well.

Based on survey data, designers from each group (another special thanks to Joel Brehm, Jeff Nothwehr, Seth Meranda, Christy Aggens, Vishal Singh, Aaron Coleman, and Mark Hiatt) took the Group B design as a visual starting point and moved forward with not only a visual freshening in mind, but also a charge of making more sense of the multiple navigation systems that were being used on the old site and hierarchy of the page elements as a whole. Ideas and components were combined, refined, labored-over, respectfully disagreed with, and generally massaged for several weeks until we finally arrived at where we now stand; a look that will now be coded into the next generation of University of Nebraska-Lincoln web templates.

As mentioned above, this process certainly isn’t complete. The visual design has been worked out, but now we move onto the coding phase, and your help is needed.

We’ve made a PDF of the WDN template presentation (13mb) available for download.

Web sites are the tip of the spear these days in competition among universities. We often think of our site as a marketing vehicle, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a trove of scholarly output, a resource for professional journals and research publications, a lens into our planning and decisionmaking processes as a university. More and more, our website, taken as a whole, is a full and rich version of what we are as a university; our people, our activities and our ideas. More and more, it is the view through which others see us. For many who will never set foot in Lincoln, it may be the only view of us they have.

That’s what I’m thinking about as I scan through a new report on university “Webometrics,” passed along by friend Rebecca Carr, national coordinator of the AAU Data Exchange.*

“The “Webometrics Ranking of World Universities” is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain,” says the opening page of the “webometrics” report. To paraphrase the “about” of the report, it is an attempt to rank the scholarly activity of any given university as revealed through its online presence.

So how did we do?

In the report, we’re number 67. Which if you’re a college basketball fan is good enough for a trip to the NIT. At first blush, not the greatest. But (big but) … the survey lists SIX THOUSAND institutions in its listing of Top Universities, out of 15,000 institutions analyzed. I’m feeling pretty good about that number 67 now.

It’s important to note that whatever we do as a group of web developers in the UNL Web Developer Network or in UComm Internet and Interactive Media is only in support of the scholarly discovery and online availability of that scholarly activity that is the focus of this report. If we can make it easier for individual researchers and teachers to reveal their work, their ideas and their activities to the world, we’ll be succeeding in one area of this multifaceted endeavor that is “UNL.edu.”

Note who’s at the top of the rankings: MIT. The same MIT whose Open Courseware allows the world in to sample a full breadth of academic content at one of the world’s greatest universities. Open Courseware may be the model to follow, or it may not; the question of whether or not information is free is one, I suspect, that will vex us for a long time to come.

But, again: 67. There are 66 spots above that, but it’s still something to be noted, something to be pleased about. Still, if we want to be one of the “go-to” sites for finding scholarly content, we may have to rethink and reassess and reimagine who and what we are.

Because 67 is not 66, which is where we were in last year’s ranking.

* AAUDE is a public service organization that shares data among member institutions of the Association of American Universities (that UNL is the home of the national coordinator is another feather in the cap for us, via Rebecca’s professionalism and hard work).