Early Faculty Homepages at Truman State University

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 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• outdated pages;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.