GCSU Faculty Web Server User's Guide

Faculty Web Server Policy - Proposed

The faculty web server (FWS), purchased with funding from the University System of Georgia's Connecting Teachers and Technology Initiative, is intended to serve as a communications tool for full-time faculty members at Georgia College & State University. Its purpose is to allow faculty to create web pages describing themselves, their teaching, their scholarship, and their service activities to a wide audience including but not limited to:

• prospective and current students
• parents
• colleagues and friends of the university

These policies are intended to encourage and support faculty in their efforts to communicate their work to these important audiences in ways that reflect well on the faculty and complement the university's Liberal Arts mission. While there is no requirement that faculty use this webserver or develop web pages, it is our hope and expectation that the level of university support allocated to the GCSU Faculty Web Server and its users will provide sufficient incentive to do so.

The Department of Web Enabled Resources at GCSU is charged with the responsibility of maintaining the FWS at a high level of availability and functionality consistent with campus-wide security and resource requirements, as well as supporting FWS users through training, help desk support, providing standard software and managing accounts on the server, including disk space allocation, so as to maximize the benefits to the faculty as a whole.

With these principles in mind, the following policies were developed:

• Any full-time faculty person may request an account on the FWS. Adjunct and temporary faculty may request accounts with the endorsement of their department chair.
  
  
• All FWS accounts will be restricted to a specific amount of disk space so as to assure all faculty of the opportunity to use this facility. Additional disk space may be requested where a compelling need can be shown.
  
  
• Individual faculty and their departments will not incur any costs associated with normal use of the FWS.
  
  
• Web Enabled Resources will install and maintain the following special services for the FWS:
  
  
  1. Site-wide CGI Services for counters and forms handling,
  2. a Site-wide search facility,
  3. Uninterruptable Power Service for 120 minutes or longer,
  4. regularly publish comprehensive statistics on FWS visitors and system "up-time," and
  5. publish online documentation providing information on operations that are specific to the FWS (i.e. how to configure Microsoft Front Page to "Publish" to the FWS).
  
  
  
• Faculty may create the HTML code necessary to constructing web pages with whatever software they have and are most comfortable with. Training and support, however, may be limited to one or two applications and further limited to those things not covered adequately in the basic or supplemental documentation.
  
  
• Generally, faculty are responsible for making their web pages display as intended with major web browsers in current use across all major platforms. However, assistance is available to address those problems not covered in commonly available references on HTML, graphics and media in common use or so severe as to cause visitors' web browsers to crash or become unstable.
  
  
• Instructional pages or faculty home pages on the FWS are unofficial and as such, require no pre-approval prior to publication. However, these pages are subject to review on the basis of the university's "Appropriate Use" policy.
  
  
• Faculty web pages should include a disclaimer stating that the information contained therein has not been reviewed by university administration and, as such, is not official information.
  
  
• Faculty are expected to be aware of the University System of Georgia's policy on the educational use of copyrighted materials and to adhere to that policy. The FWS is "world viewable." Thus, if permission to use copyrighted materials is contingent upon restricting access, another, secure, server such as theWebCT Server should be used.
  
  
• To ensure the security and high level of performance of the FWS and the network upon which it depends, the use of any executable program on the server other than offering it for download will be solely at the discretion of the System Administrator. Most commonly, this includes CGIs, Java Servlets and scripting systems that extend the capabilities of the server.

Return to the GCSU FWS User's Guide

The GCSU Faculty Web Server is maintained and operated by
Web Enabled Resources at GCSU