One of the things I am very much interested in is how scholars find and use information on the internet. More and more the ability to effectively query online information seems to have an impact on the quality of research. I have built two academic portals with Drupal and so have some experience with organising knowledge, or access to knowledge, online for particular fields & resources (see European History Primary Sources and Yiddish Sources).

I would be very much interested in sharing experiences with others who have built online resources and I would therefore suggest a session where we discuss how to organise knowledge online and particular what issues need to be taken into account when building online resources for academic purposes.

The idea of the session could be to create some guidelines for effective webdesign for academic purposes. Some points that could be discussed:

– choice of system: what CMS to use etc.

– design issues: effective user interfaces, navigation, functionality

– what are the issues and problems we encounter when setting up a website for a particular academic field/audience?

– how can we best engage users? Does Web 2.0 functionality always make sense?

These are just some ideas so any comments most welcome!