The Open University and UCL have been pursuing projects to deliver on-demand audio and video podcasting recording and distribution services primarily via Apple's iTunes U service. In this talk, Nicholas and Jeremy will discuss how the different approaches of two very different institutions impacted on the nature of the two projects, how challenges were addressed and how solutions were developed. The session was facilitated by Jeremy Speller, UCL and Nicholas Watson.

The workshop is an opportunity to consider the implications for university-based Web sites of the use of external, embeddable commercial services. As embeddable services and communities increasingly dominate, Web sites are evolving into Web presences, with implications for marketing, functionality and evaluation. We will look at some examples from Higher Education Academy Subject Centres' use of services such as YouTube, Google Books and PBwiki, consider some risks and benefits and invite participants to share their own attitudes towards these services, whether pro or con. The session was facilitated by Dr Martin L Poulter, University of Bristol and Kwansuree Jiamton, King's College London.

In a follow up to James Currall's plenary talk on "The Tangled Web is but a Fleeting Dream ...but then again..." this session will discuss the challenges of Web preservation (what should we actually preserve?; what about IPR? and how do we address the technical challenges?). The session will review some of the approachs to the preservation of static content which were addressed at the first of the JISC PoWR workshops which was organised by the JISC-funded Preservation of Web Resources (PoWR) project. The workshop will go on to explore some of the adaditional challenges being posed by Web 2.0. The session was facilitated by Marieke Guy and Brian Kelly, UKOLN, University of Bath.

Web content is increasingly produced by authors without extensive web design skills - whether by staff using CMSs, VLEs and courseware or by students publishing their coursework online. The challenge of making sure this content is as accessible as possible becomes much more significant, and inevitably a burden on the individual or institution. The quality of the authoring tool in supporting accessible content creation becomes critical - however support for the W3C's Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) by authoring tool vendors seems to be seen as a specific (and usually low priority) customer request rather than a fundamental quality of the tool. For institutions considering selecting a VLE, CMS or other tool that supports web content publication, how can they best express accessibility requirements so that the tool takes its share of responsibility for accessible output? And if existing tools fall short of ATAG conformance, how can the effect of this on the accessibility of content best be managed? The session was facilitated by David Sloan, University of Dundee.

Creating good forms is a tricky business encompassing a wide range of disciples (accessibility, usability, security, etc). What's more, the development of bespoke online forms, and their back-end reporting interfaces, can be a huge resource drain for institutional Web teams. This session will tackle these problems by asking 'what do we need to know to make better forms, and how can we better manage form development processes'? As a case study, we will look at how the implementation of a form building and management application has aided the Web team at City University. The session was facilitated by Dan Jackson, City University.

This session will review how a number of Web 2.0 technologies that are both internally and externally hosted and can be used to future proof the way that teams in institutions can work effectively together. The session was facilitated by Andy Ramsden and Marieke Guy, University of Bath.

David Sloan, Digital Media Access Group, University of Dundee and Simon Ball, Techdis will think about how we promote contextual accessibility as an institutional standard? How can we encourage web authors to use diverse solutions to optimise accessibility, while making sure that basic principles of accessible design are met?

Helen Sargan, University of Cambridge will show that there are several realistic alternatives to using a slide presentation tool such as Powerpoint or similar. she'll give an overview and demo of several Web-based alternatives with the pros and cons of using them, a profile of the constituencies who would benefit, and what skills and support they might need to succeed.

Claire Gibbons, Web Officer (Marketing and Communications), University of Bradford and Russell Allen, Project Manager (Portal and CMS), Management Information Services, University of Bradford will help delegates gain an understanding of 'organisational culture' and the effect this can have on change management and/or system implementation.

Keith Doyle, Salford University explains that the aim of information architecture is to improve the information ecology which is made up of the interaction between users, content and context. What is the process and methodology required to develop an information architecture? What are the key tools and enabling services which are required to implement information architecture? How is this process evolving at Salford? There will be a chance to look at the information architecture of institutional web sites, tips for improving the design of sub-sites, and we will look at and discuss real world examples.

Phil Wilson, University of Bath will consider how Google's famous for it, Flickr's moved to Gamma, Moo are on an eternal 1.0 - yet still in institutions we plod on with a tired, slow-moving and opaque process for developing and enhancing applications. From our closed support lines to official notices on unread Web sites and applications mysteriously changing in front of a user's very eyes we look staid and tedious. But it doesn't have to be like that, we could be fast faced and interactive - but at what cost? Continuity? Uptime?

Sebastian Rahtz, Oxford University Computing Services, Patrick H. Lauke, University of Salford and Nigel Bradley, Web Services Manager, IT Services, Northumbria University will encourage delegates to put together a set of small demonstrations of applications in different institutions (at least Salford, Bath, Oxford and Northumbria), discuss different techniques of acquiring and storing data, see whether there are any useful inter-institutional collaborations to work on.

Andrew Cormack, Richard Dunning and Andy Powell, Eduserv will investigate the relationships between institutional single sign-on, Athens, Shibboleth, the UK Access Management Federation and more recent developments like OpenID and CardSpace and will give participants an opportunity to ask questions of a panel of experts from the community.

A sponsors page containing details of the sponsorship packages available has now been set up. Interested parties should contact the organisers. [2006-08-24]

Information on members of the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007 Advisory Group is now available [2006-10-23]

Details of plenary talks and parallel sessions are available from the IWMW 2007 Web site. A page with all details on, for printing purposes is also available. [2007-04-10]

This year we are inviting IWMW 2007 participants to submit lightweight examples of innovative uses of Web technologies which may be of interest to IWMW 2007 participants. This could include mashups, use of multimedia, use of 3-D virtual environments or seamless access to content using technologies such as OpenID. [2007-05-24]

Bookings are now closed for the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007. If you would like to put your details on a mailing list please contact events@ukoln.ac.uk or a member of the organising committee [2007-06-01]

Paul Boag has written a guest blog post for "Brian Kelly's UK Web Focus: Reflections On The Web" blog [2007-06-04]

Keith Doyle has written a guest blog post for "Brian Kelly's UK Web Focus: Reflections On The Web" blog [2007-06-05]

Delegate information on venue, registration, travel, accommodation and other aspects of the workshop is now available. [2007-06-22]

With the introduction of variable fees Universities have entered what education secretary Ruth Kelly called "a new era". Financial departments have had to find more creative ways to meet the sector's growing competitive demands and those working within universities have had to take a more business-like, customer-focused approach to many aspects of their work as they compete for students.

Paul Boag, from Headscape, considers how social participation is the cornerstone of the web 2.0 movement and has been spearheaded by sites such as digg.com. One of the underlying principles of these sites is that peer to peer recommendations carry more weight than those from either a search engine or from corporate advertising. The commercial sector has been quick to adopt this peer review mechanism with customer reviews and ratings. This talk proposes to explore how social participation can be applied to the process of recruiting new students and what lessons can be learnt from the approach adopted by the commercial sector. We will also look at what institutional barriers exist that prevent this approach and how these can be overcome.

Peter Reader, University of Bath explains that E-communications, e-marketing and social media are hot topics for university marketers and communicators, with old ideas of 'control' looking more and more unrealistic. Now the talk is of 'influence', viral marketing, students as customers, and of client management, with the web and web technologies seen increasingly as the university's most important marketing tools. So what are the challenges, and what are the issues with which marketers will face us? Expect more of "why" and "want" than of "how"!

During Keith Doyle, Salford University talk, delegates will discover how, by taking the information architecture approach as their next step, they can improve the user experience and business benefits. Information architecture gives delegates a framework and benchmarks for managing web provision at an institutional level. This should be an engaging and entertaining talk which would help delegates decide whether a formal IA role is appropriate to their organisation. Helping delegates consider their institutional strategic approach: What is IA? How is the role covered at the moment? Should it be a specific post rather than something that's squeezed in with everything else we do?

Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services (Senior Manager, Web Services Evangelism) will discuss Amazon's approach to Web-scale computing. Using this new approach, developers can use Amazon's broad line of web services to rapidly and cost-effectively build scalable and flexible Web applications. Jeff will focus on Amazon's newest services, including the Simple Queue Service, the Simple Storage Service, and the Elastic Compute Cloud. The talk will include technical details and an overview of how the services are being used by customers all over the world.

Steven Warburton will discuss how the notion of community continues to be recognised as a fundamental aspect within descriptions of shared human activity and group bonding. In his socio-cultural analysis of the work place Wenger defined a particular type of communion, which he termed a community of practice (CoP). The concept of a CoP has been somewhat abused in current literature yet it does provide valuable insights into how communities evolve, behave and sustain themselves. By elaborating dimensions of community such as shared practice, dialogue, legitimate peripheral participation and negotiation of boundaries, Wenger has provided a model that can be applied to a number of differing groups of activity. This talk will explore what we can draw from the work on CoPs, in terms of the role and identity of institutional web manager, one that is inseparable from a field of practice that remains dynamic, fluid and under constant negotiation.

Chris Young, Netskills, University of Newcastle and Paul Trueman, Netskills, University of Newcastle will be looking at accreditation systems. You may be new to a Web-role or you may be more experienced, with a set of useful skills. Either way, increasingly there is a need for recognised individual development and accreditation in order to progress in within your organisation and with your own career.

This session will be run by Michael Day, DCC, UKOLN, Maureen Pennock, DCC, UKOLN and Lizzie Richmond, University Archivist, University of Bath. Institutional Web sites have become an increasingly important tool for disseminating key institutional information to and between staff, students, researchers and the general public. They are widely recognised as key front-office mechanisms for the communication of important information, but the long-term survival of Web site resources and data with non-transient or enduring value is often overridden by the short-term benefits of on-the-fly Web site management. As a result, even institutions with Web site archiving policies can find themselves falling victim to the so-called digital dark ages and fail to preserve valuable information.

Keith Doyle, University of Salford will facilitate this session. A small group of people are working towards setting up a peer group to share good practise and knowledge. In this session, there will be the opportunity for delegates working to develop University Intranets to share their thoughts on developments around intranets and portals. We will also discuss how the peer group could develop.

Duncan Davidson, Information Manager, University of Abertay Dundee and Donna Wilkinson, Information Specialist, University of Abertay Dundeed will look at their University's development plans, the related projects - University Portal and Information Architecture, where we have been, current work and the road ahead.

Barry Cornelius, Computing Services, University of Oxford will explore how to make RSS work in your institution. Recently, the University of Oxford has risen to this challenge: it has delivered a devolved institutional newsfeed system. This workshop session will discuss how this system was produced and will demonstrate how easy it is to produce news items and get them displayed on a Web page or delivered through RSS.

Brian Kelly, UKOLN and Lawrie Phipps, JISC will review the barriers which we may face when implementing a Web 2.0 strategy and will outline a model and strategies which can be be used in order to address such barriers.

David Burden, Managing Director, DADENLIMITED and Marieke Guy, UKOLN will consider questions like: Can chatbots make sites more accessible or do they break fundamental usability rules? Do users like them, or find them irritating or even patronising? Are they the next best thing or a 5 minute wonder? Can they really benefit the education sector? Can a chatbot ever really learn?

Julie Allinson and Mahendra Mahey, UKOLN will give an overview of the current repository landscape, looking at the different types of repositories, their use within education and the range of issues relating to repositories, including cultural, social, legal, technical and policy considerations. Current JISC work in this area will be highlighted, focussing on how this work will contribute to raising quality standards in repository development, through interoperability and the use of open standards.

The Web is changing. It is no longer a phenomenon but has integrated itself within our culture. However for those creating Web services times are far from stable. A wide range of Web-based applications continue to be developed, such as blogs, wikis, podcasting, social networking software, RSS feeds etc. The Semantic Web is still on the cards and now we have Web 2.0, an opportunity for a more sharing, more participative Web? Is it just hype? Will these progressions make any difference to the way in which we go about our work? What does Web 2.0 mean to the Institutional Web? This panel session offered three different perspectives on the potential of Web 2.0 within learning activities - the library perspective, the commercial perspective and the HE/FE perspective.

Andy Powell gave a talk about how it goes without saying that the Web has changed significantly over the last 10 years and that institutional Web sites have changed with it - just use the Wayback Machine to look back at your own site in 1996 to see what I mean. Such changes have not simply been in terms of style and substance but also in terms of how we expect to interact with, use and re-use the content and services being made available to us. In short, the Web has changed us and the way we learn and work. This talk will look back over the last 10 years and highlight some of the key technical, social, political and legal changes that have taken place and the impact these have had on the institutional Web sites we deliver now and will deliver into the future.

Kate Forbes-Pitt, Systems Manager, Web Services, London School of Economics will talk about aims aims to problematise the document, asking the following questions: what is a document? How does it impart information to its reader? Can it be replicated on screen? It proposes answers using the arguments of Hughes and King (1993) who contend that the document is a layered social artifact that exists to 'wrap' content. This 'wrapping' provides the reader with the knowledge they need in order to apply social rules to their reading of the document, and so become able to interpret its content. Some information systems writers argue that the need for social knowledge in a task negates the possibility of its automation. Following the logic of this argument, delivering a document (a container of rule) through the existing set of social rules that govern Web interaction, means that the full function of the electronically reproduced document becomes masked or confused. At best this makes the role of the document superfluous to its content, making the content difficult to interpret. At worst it makes the content incomprehensible to the user. This raises a further question: what purpose is served by reproducing documents online? Following from the above arguments, it is possible to argue that 'pure' content, rather than the imitation of printed paper, is likely to be a more successful way of imparting information through the Web.

IWMW 15 Institutional Web Management Workshop 2011: Responding to Change held at the University of Reading on 26-27 July 2011

IWMW 14 Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010: The Web in Turbulent Times held at the University of Sheffield on 12-14 July 2010

IWMW 13: Institutional Web Management 2009, held at the University of Essex on 28-30 July 2009

IWMW 12: Institutional Web Management 2008: The Great Debate, held at the University of Aberdeen on 22-24 July 2008

IWMW 11: Institutional Web Management 2007: Next Steps for the Web Management Community, held at the University of York on 16-18 July 2007

IWMW 10: Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005: Quality Matters, held at the University of Bath on 14-16 June 2006

IWMW 9: Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005: Whose Web Is It Anyway?, held at the University of Manchester on 6-8 July 2005

IWMW 8: Institutional Web Management Workshop 2004: Transforming The Organisation, held at the University of Birmingham on 27-29 June 2004

IWMW 7: Institutional Web Management Workshop 2003: Supporting Our Users, held at the University of Kent at Canterbury on 11-13 June 2003

IWMW 6: Institutional Web Management Workshop 2002: The Pervasive Web, held at the University of Strathclyde on 18-20 June 2002

IWMW 5: Institutional Web Management Workshop: Organising Chaos, held at Queen's University Belfast on 25-27 June 2001

IWMW 4: Institutional Web Management: The Joined-Up Web, held at the University of Bath on 6-8 September 2000