Internet and web services

Institutional web pages

Departments, colleges and research units are encouraged to either

• maintain their own web servers
• use the Computing Service managed web server facility (which is free of charge) or
• use the Computing Service Falcon content management service (which costs £100 per year)

The Computing Service runs courses on setting up a web server, writing web pages and on using Falcon (see training information). Guidelines for Web Information Providers have been published by the IT Syndicate to give an indication of the responsiblities of the publisher.

For web servers and the managed web server facility, the University web templates are available as a package from http://www.cam.ac.uk/about/webstyle/, where there are also guidelines and examples to view. Falcon is pre-templated with the University house style.

Personal, society & group web pages

Personal, society and group web pages may be published on DS-Web (PWF), which is available to all staff and students. Information about publishing web pages from DS-Web (PWF) is available in leaflet M350: Web pages on the PWF: personal and group (pdf). Other possible locations for publishing web pages are suggested in IS44: Personal Web pages on the University Network.

Web support

Information to support web users is available at https://wiki.cam.ac.uk/websupport/. Courses about using the web, writing HTML, and setting up web servers are available from the Computing Service - training information. Queries from people setting up and running servers and web pages locally can be sent by email to web-support@ucs.cam.ac.uk.

The Web Liaison Group meets regularly to discuss web technologies and act as a discussion forum for isolated 'web workers' throughout the University and Colleges. We try to cover topics of interest to all webmasters and of special interest to the academic web server manager and information provider. For more information online see the web support wiki (above) or contact Helen Sargan (tel 34480 or email hvs1001@cam.ac.uk).

Internet services provided by the Computing Service

The Computing Service run the main University web server. Other services are available for University users:

• A NAT (Network Address Translation) service for CUDN-wide private IP addresses (host names ending .private.cam.ac.uk). The NAT service enables these systems to have direct access to hosts on the internet.
• A site-wide search facility can be used to search all official webservers in the University both as a group and individually. Web server managers and information providers can also configure constrained searches of information on a particular server (full details on how to do this are online) or query web-support@ucs.cam.ac.uk.

Other services are available to institutions, departments and groups. A few of these are also available to groups of users.

Information resources

Staff and students of the university have access both on and off campus to a wide range of electronic information resources including e-journals, online databases, e-books, sound and images. eresources@cambridge provides links to all titles and is the best starting point for discovering what is available in your subject area. For scientists, Science@cambridge provides a virtual library space to help users discover, search across and use science e-resources, generally and within discipline-specific areas. Both eresources@cambridge and science@cambridge are University Library services.

On campus access to electronic resources generally does not require a password. Access off campus is by Raven password, administered by the University Computing Service. For further information on off-campus access please consult the advice on the library's web pages.

Last updated: September 2011