SITES WHICH ARE THREATENED BY THE PROPOSED NEW POLICY

Sites which would no longer exist on University computers

• Adrian Dover's sites

  • Henry James web-site

    This is one of the two major sources of electronic texts and indexes to Henry James (1843-1916) in the world; the other is hosted at the State University of New York, New Paltz, on the personal website of Professor Richard Hathaway

    The site currently comprises 'scholarly editions' of the texts of five novels and some 40+ short stories, with more in progress. The majority of these titles are unique on the web, but even where not, the edition is unique (James was an inveterate reviser) and no other site offers linked notes, introductions and bibliographies.

    Also on the site are annotated texts of the majority of James's 'Prefaces' to his New York edition, a major source of twentieth century literary theories, not otherwise available electronically. Their recent appearance in this form was welcomed by a published James scholar.

    A computer generated concordance to the fiction texts on the site is maintained with a custom written script run by the operator (CGIs are not used). A separate concordance to the prefaces is being planned.

    An index to printed collections of James's short stories and an index of his notebook name-lists are also available.

    The site has been cited in at least one published (printed) paper known to me, in _The Henry James review_ and receives about 1000 hits per month (excluding web crawlers).

    Adrian Dover works for Information Services so this site would presumably not be considered relevant to his work for the University! He says: "At 70MB (and growing) the site is too big to be hosted by most domestic ISP accounts, which impose a 50MB limit per site. Also I currently have no web access from home (I bring my files in on floppy disks still!), so in the event of implementation of the new policy at the end of March this resource will be lost to the world academic community. To buy a PC capable of supporting this work would cost me over £1,000. No way can I afford to support the academic research of the world on my meagre university salary."

  • A small Denis Mackail web-site

    The only source of specific information on the web about the author Denis Mackail (1892-1971), comprising a biography and descriptive bibliography. No etexts are mounted, as his work is still copyright, but Persephone Books ( http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/ ) recently reprinted one of his novels and my site gets about 20 hits per month.

  • Honeychildren web-site

    Information for fans of the singer Eddi Reader. Although started well before her official website http://www.eddireader.com/, the intention has always been to collect and annotate discographic details of her work, not to act as a publicity channel.

  Adrian Dover's Home Page

  Read Adrian's letter to John Owen!

• Satoko Takami, a postgraduate student in the English Department, runs a website with Japanese learning materials on the Sun7. This is a resource for staff and students at the University. But Satoko's Ph.D. is in English, not Japanese, so she would fall foul of the rule that websites have to be relevant to one's academic work.

  Satoko's Japanese site can be found here

• Prof. Asif Ahmed, Professor of Reproductive Physiology, has a site called English Poets on which he publishes his own and others' poetry, and provides a message board for poets to post their work for others to discuss. Some of this has just been published in Saffron Tea (Heaventree Press/Sampad 2004), which was launched at the Midlands Arts Centre on 16th January 2004 (filmed by the BBC). Sampad specialises in promoting art, drama and creative writing by British Asians living in the West Midlands.

  His site is at   http://englishpoets.com

  which redirects visitors to:

  http://medweb.bham.ac.uk/vascularbiology/poetry/index.htm (on the Medical School server)

• Sue Blackwell, a member of staff in the English Department, has a number of pages on political topics. Her joint pages with Rumy Hasan, a lecturer at Leeds University, on the undemocratic practices of the Socialist Workers Party have acquired something of a cult following on the British left. One of the websites of the Birmingham University Stop the War Group (BUSTW), which includes both staff and students at Birmingham University, is maintained by Sue and includes photographs of past demonstrations when Tony Blair and Jack Straw have visited campus. Another of Sue's sites is a trade union page, linked to from the main Birmingham AUT page, with links to many trade union sites including campaigns against workplace bullying. Sue has received a number of e-mails from staff and students at the University who have experienced such bullying.

  Sue's best known web site is the one on Palestine and Israel. In Autumn 2002 there was a concerted campaign by pro-Israel organisations and individuals to get her site shut down, claiming that it was "anti-semitic" and contained "visual glorifications of suicide bombers". Sue says: "These claims were malicious lies. I condemn all forms of terrorism including the state terrorism of the American, British and Israeli governments. Many of the links from my site are to Jewish and Israeli peace organisations. The suggestion that I am in any way anti-semitic is as offensive to me as it is ludicrous." The Registrar and Secretary of the University at that time, David Allen, issued a public vindication of Sue's pages, stating that she had "done nothing wrong" and upholding the principles of academic freedom. Now, however, all Sue's political sites are under threat. "I am sure that the University considers my sites an embarrassment", she says. "But they should see them as an asset. I recently got an e-mail from a student in the USA who wanted to write a dissertation about the Israeli reservists who are refusing to serve in the occupied territories. I was able to put that student in touch with Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace bloc. The dissertation was in the field of philosophy and ethics, which of course is not my academic area any more than Middle-Eastern politics is. But my site has provided a resource for academics as well as activists all over the world. That American student remarked on the fact that it was difficult to come across such resources in the USA. This site is needed. The fact that it is not related to the subjects that I teach is irrelevant."

  Sue has learnt Dutch as a foreign language and has a site for Dutch culture and language. "Presumably because I teach English and not Dutch, that site would have to go too", she says. "The whole thing is utterly ridiculous."

• Kevin Busby is Studio Manager in the University's electroacoustic music studios. "I have always felt that the point of the Web is to allow and encourage the provision of free and useful information", he says. "So, apart from an introduction and an account of my duties as , which I believe is pertinent information to prospective students, the site is, as I state in the first line of the main page, "a small selection of information about electronic music". Over the years I have concentrated on updating the most popular features, which are an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions list) for the German electronic music band Kraftwerk and a discography for the Australian electronic music/video group Sevcom. The usefulness of these features is reflected in the 4564 requests received for the FAQ in January alone, the according of "official" status to the discography and the fact that the FAQ has been translated by volunteers at other sites around the world into Japanese, Hungarian and Catalan (with Portuguese to follow). Other information on these pages includes a simple music hardware project and some music software."

  Needless to say, information about "non-academic" electronic music is not something which would appear in the other sites that Kevin maintains for the electroacoustic music studios (over 66 pages, with concert photos and audio) and for the Studio Director, Prof. Jonty Harrison.

  However, he believes that such unofficial information is indirectly of benefit to the university, not least in providing a more personal note to prospective students than anything offered by the official pages.

  Kevin says: "I do maintain other, non-profit-making Web sites, not hosted at the University, mostly related to my own musical activities. I am reluctant to spend more money on hosting information, so if the University decides to remove personal sites, the information I have provided will probably disappear from the Web."

  Kevin's site also contains links to some environmental campaigns: one of his concerns is with Genetically Modified Crops.

  Kevin's pages can be found here.

• Dr. Nat Queen is a lecturer in the Maths Department. His home page contains general information about himself and links to useful resources in maths and science, and also links concerned with human rights. "Some of the latter, which highlight violations of basic human rights, have evidently been construed by some readers as 'political content'," says Dr. Queen.

  Another of Nat's pages provides an Introduction to PGP, which many people find useful to learn how to establish secure e-mail. Considered a standard resource (and mentioned in FAQs), this page gets about 1000 hits per month, including many from other universities, government agencies, etc.

  Yet another of Nat's pages is the Acorn site - generally considered the main (and only?) web resource for encryption and security utilities for RISC OS (Acorn) computers. This gets a few hundred hits per month.

Sites which would suffer severe disruption by being forced to move

• Dr Waldemar Bujalski established his personal web site on 20th February 1995: "I was one of the first enthusiasts of the new technology and did it using notepad and html language edited character by character at that time! I kept its original (rather archaic by today's standards) design on purpose. It has a significant historical/personal/sentimental value for me and it would be very unfortunate if it were to disappear from cyberspace because of the bureaucratic nature of our institution."

  Waldemar Bujalski's home page

  Dr. Bujalski has established an offshoot from his original site for the Fluid Mixing Processes Subject Group of the IChemE (i.e. Institution of Chemical Engineers, his national professional body):

  FMPSG site

  This is a vital source of information for about 200 members from all over the world. Discontinuing the web address would cause a major communication problems for the group.

• The International Association of Forensic Linguists has its official site on the Sun7 (The domain name http://www.iafl.org redirects the user to this site). The facilities include an online searchable Bibliography on language and the law. The IAFL site is split across the Sun6 and Sun7. The Sun7 also hosts the Scientific Commission for Forensic Linguistics of AILA, the International Association of Applied Linguistics.

  These IAFL and AILA pages are maintained by a postgraduate student, Jess Shapero, who is paid to work for IAFL for a few hours a month. Any major changes to the websites will require plenty of time to implement. The Bibliography pages require PHP and MYSQL, which the servers maintained by the Corporate Web Team do not support.

  Jess says: "The IAFL is a professional organisation, and its resources, particularly this web site, are used by academic and non-academic linguists and lawers, students and teachers from all over the world. I use PHP and MySQL for some of the pages, and need my telnet access for direct manipulation of both the files and code. I also need the power of a UNIX-like system for these and poper access to my scripts. I am very worried about the amount of work which would be involved in any changes to the present set up. As a part-time student who is only employed by the IAFL for a few hours a month, the time I can devote to what ought to be a reasonably up to date resource is greatly limited. Since the site's creation in 1999 we have already had several changes of servers and URLs, and changes in software, the last being the traumatic upgrading of PHP3 to PHP4 and the separation of the IAFL site onto two servers."

• Dr. Nat Queen (see above) has pages which support two major modules which he is teaching at present, each with several sub-pages:

  http://web.bham.ac.uk/N.M.Queen/msm1 a/
  http://web.bham.ac.uk/N.M.Queen/ms m3g07/

  Nat says: " If the present Sun7 service is to be discontinued at the end of March, this will do many students a serious disservice. I know from past experience that many students consult web pages such as these, especially when revising for examinations (April, May). All the students in my modules know those URLs. If they suddenly disappear, the students will be extremely disappointed. I could transfer those pages to a server in my department, but I am not at all sure that I will find time to do so before the end of March, and I may be forced to abandon them. I am by no means the only person to maintain such pages to support taught modules."

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  This page is maintained by Sue Blackwell
  Last updated: 4th March 2004