Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 15:59:11 +0100 (BST)
Dear John,
Thanks for your reply.
» Sue - we gave you an extension whilst the School reviewed your web
site.
Yes, I was aware of this. Alex Hughes (HoS) told me that a School
IT committee (don't know its exact name) would be meeting during
April.
» Subsequent to the meeting we were informed that you had been
Then you were informed wrongly. I have had NO notification that
the School committee has in fact met (though I assumed that it
must have done by now), and nobody has contacted me by any means
(internal mail, e-mail, phone or whatever) to tell me what it
decided, let alone to ask me to remove anything whatsover. Of
course it is possible that something has got lost in the internal
mail. Please tell me WHO is supposed to have contacted me and
WHEN, and HOW they claim to have done it. And what was this
"period of grace" which I was never told about??
This is irrelevant given that the school committee was not meeting
until after that date.
What were the "further complaints"? In the past I have been sent
copies of complaints made about my websites but I was not told
anything about any new ones last week. And does it matter to
the University whether there is any substance whatsoever in the
complaints it receives, or does it act even on complaints which
are patently ludicrous? Just asking.
Are you saying that only undergraduate teaching material is related
to my academic work, and not, for instance, my research pages??
It may not have been your intention but it has certainly been
the result. I had a blind student in my office yesterday who
told me how much she relied on my web pages for her work, and
she was dismayed to learn that she could no longer access them
from outside the university (she has specialist text-to-speech
software installed on her computer at home).
I do not know what you mean by "the linguistics material". Some
of my colleagues have their own pages concerned with linguistics,
and that is up to them. I do not necessarily know what they have,
and I do not have the time to get involved with additional web pages.
Moreover, the point of having personal web pages is that the users
maintain them themselves, and that is what I and no doubt many of
my colleagues wish to continue to do.
I repeat, I am still waiting to receive notification of the
outcome of my application to retain my web pages. If I do not
shortly receive a satisfactory explanation of what is going on,
I will be making a formal complaint.
Sue Blackwell
Phone: +44 - 0121-414-3219
e-mail: S.A.Blackwell@bham.ac.uk
Sue's Home Page: http://web.bham.ac.uk/sue_blackwell
Last updated: 17th September 2004
From: SA Blackwell
Subject: RE: Web pages
To: j.g.owen@bham.ac.uk
Cc: s.a.blackwell@bham.ac.uk, m.i.shoebridge@bham.ac.uk, d.r.supple@bham.ac.uk, a.hughes@bham.ac.uk, c.b.bayliss@bham.ac.uk
» asked to remove certain material and we allowed a period of
» grace for this to be completed.
» As you know the official deadline passed on 1 April.
» When we received further complaints about material on your site
» last week we had no choice but to block access, in line with
» University policy.
» If you wish to remove all material except the undergraduate
» teaching material we could restore access to this and give you
» until the summer to migrate this material.
» As you know it was never our intention to
» disadvantage students by this measure.
» I strongly also recommend that you talk to David Supple's team about
» rationalising the linguistics material into a single, corporate
» location so we can properly maintain this material into the future.
Department of English,
The University of Birmingham,
Edgbaston,
BIRMINGHAM B15 2TT
Fax: +44 - 0121-414-5668