The evolution and devolution of the university webmaster role

The role of university webmaster emerged in the early 1990s and has undergone a series of rapid changes concomitant with the increasing importance of the university website as the public face of the university and the interface to a range of university services. This paper describes the evolution of the webmaster role from that of a curiosity-driven technological innovator to an all-powerful system administrator controlling server setup and maintenance, site architecture, site design, writing, marking up and authorisation of content, scripting and user support. The paper then explores the subsequent devolution of the webmaster role as it grew too big for one person to handle. The role shifted away from a technology towards content, focussing on collating and marking up content and writing policy and guidelines for web authors. This shift from system administration to content administration has led to a shift of the webmaster role to that of manager of a team of web content providers, web developers, graphic designers and user experience specialists housed in an information technology division, library, or media and publishing unit. However with the advent of portals, web applications and web interfaces to databases and other corporate software, the definition of a university website and the role of university webmaster is becoming problematic or perhaps even irrelevant. The confusion about the role of websites and webmasters is in a large part due to the relative recency of the web as a publishing medium, the lag-time for senior executive to endorse web strategies for university-wide information dissemination, the inevitable inertia in large institutions to provide appropriate infrastructure support for new strategic directions and the fact that web and internet technology is a rapidly moving target.