# Early Faculty Homepages at Truman State University

By 2000, Truman faculty were publishing directly to personal www2.truman.edu spaces using tools such as Netscape Composer and the campus T: drive.

2026-07-01


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Early university websites were not always centrally designed.

At Truman State University, faculty could publish their own pages directly into personal Web space.

That created a second layer of the University Web: individual academic pages alongside the official institutional site.

## A firm 2000 example survives

A September 2000 Truman AAUP newsletter provides unusually direct evidence.

It associates faculty member Gary Jones with:

- a Truman email address;
- a personal [www2.truman.edu](http://www2.truman.edu) page;
- publication material stored under his personal Web space.

The newsletter also tells faculty that they could edit a file in **Netscape Composer**, save it to the campus **T: drive**, and have a Web page.

That is not a retrospective description.

It is contemporary publishing advice.

## Faculty pages were individually authored

Personal faculty pages could contain things such as:

- course material;
- research links;
- professional information;
- publication material;
- locally maintained navigation.

The surviving 2000 evidence shows that these pages could exist outside a perfectly uniform central design.

That is important when reconstructing the early Truman Web.

The University site was not one monolithic publication.

It was a collection of centrally and locally maintained spaces.

## Division pages were uneven too

The same 2000 AAUP newsletter criticizes parts of Truman’s Web presence for:

- broken links;
- outdated pages;
- missing division-head pages;
- inconsistent organization.

That tells us decentralization had a cost.

Giving departments and faculty direct control produced useful local publishing, but it also produced uneven maintenance.

## A personal URL does not prove when the page began

A page found at a faculty URL in 2000 proves that the page existed by that date.

It does not prove:

- when the faculty member first published;
- whether an earlier version existed;
- whether the current archived copy matches the original;
- whether the person was among Truman’s first faculty Web publishers.

Those questions require dated references and archive captures.

## What did the publishing workflow look like?

The evidence points to a simple model:

**edit file → save to personal Web storage → public www2 URL**

That is materially different from a modern content-management system.

There was no requirement that every faculty page use one institutional theme or browser-based editor.

## Why personal homepages mattered

Before modern profile systems, a faculty homepage could serve as:

- biography;
- syllabus host;
- resource list;
- publication index;
- project page;
- course website.

It gave an individual academic direct control over a public Web presence.

## What remains to be cataloged

A full field survey still needs a dated sample of faculty pages from the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Each should record:

- faculty member;
- department;
- URL;
- contemporary reference date;
- earliest archive capture;
- actual surviving content.

The key caution is simple:

A 2000 faculty page is a strong artifact.

It is not automatically the first faculty homepage at Truman.

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Canonical URL: https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/early-faculty-homepages-truman-state-university/

Language: en-us

Content type: article

Published: 2026-07-01T17:48:52+00:00

Description: What surviving Truman records reveal about faculty-authored homepages before centrally managed academic websites became the norm.