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WSU Web PolicyInformation placed on the Web site plays an important role in developing and maintaining the strong reputation and image of Winona State. It's important that all Websites conform to Winona State's Web design and accessibility guidelines in order to achieve a consistent look and feel for the university community, and to make the Winona State Website easier to navigate. All information on the University web sites must reflect the mission, interest and standards of the university community and must also comply with local, state and federal laws including, but not limited to, copyright, libel and indecency statutes. The university is not responsible for the content, accuracy, or timeliness of information contained on its servers. Issues of content, accuracy, and timeliness should be directed to the providers of those information pages. Those providers include Winona State offices, departments and other units, as well as individual faculty, staff and students. The university reserves the right to limit or restrict commercial materials on the Website. Violation of Web site policies will result in immediate revocation of Winona State web site publishing privileges. 1. The WSU Web Site is a University facility supporting a range of activities, including:
2. The Objectives of this Policy are to:
a. Provide requirements and guidelines for the use of the University web facilities. INDEX 3. Scope of this Policy This policy applies to all materials mounted on any University web servers. 4. Technical Management of the Site Technical development and maintenance of the Site is the responsibility solely of the Department of Information Technology. 5. Guiding Principles for the Use of the Site Staff, students and other authorized users of the Site are expected to use the WSU Web in a manner, which will promote the University. The University aims to encourage the use its Site in a way that protects freedom of expression, while at the same time recognizing that certain visual materials, language and topics may cause genuine offense to members of the University community and beyond. In pursuit of this objective, academic staff who wish to mount on the Site materials directly related to their teaching and/or research, that could be offensive to some people, should either request that access to this section of the Site be restricted or place on the first page of their section of the Site a warning that images and/or text linked to this area may offend some people. Users must not use the Site or infrastructure for sending, displaying, receiving or publicizing links or materials, which are offensive (see paragraph above) or illegal. It should be noted that while publishing on-line information offers many advantages, the same care in the management of data needs to be exercised, as is the case with conventional publishing. This includes:
6.1 Principal Objectives The principal objectives of the System are to enable responsibility for maintaining areas of the Web Site to be distributed to staff across the University, in such a way as to maintain appropriate freedom of expression while ensuring a high quality and consistency of the pages on the web. These objectives are to be achieved via:
a. Developing and using WSU web publishing system that will enable staff after brief training to develop and maintain web pages. The publishing system ensures that all material undergoes a three stage process of development, quality assurance and production. 7. Regulations 7.1 WSU Page Template An official University material will be published to a template which will contain:
a. Standard University header for the upper most levels of each node on the Site.
Staff lists of a faculty, school, division or section of the University constitute official University pages and will be published via the System. The personal professional pages of academic staff would not be required to be quality assured. 7.2 Delegation of Responsibilities and Authorities for Publishing on the WSU Site The assignment of responsibilities for developing or maintaining sections of the Site must be consistent with existing WSU delegations and accountabilities. Only one version of official WSU information may be published on the Site, in most cases one department or office will be responsible for the accuracy of the information. For example, the Office of Admissions will furnish the official version of recruiting and promotional materials. Other offices and departments must conform to that version. 7.3 Quality Assurance 1. Rationale To assure the quality of information published on the Site, each department or office will be required to appoint quality assurors for their web pages for which they have responsibility. While the Web Site Sub Committee attempts to minimize the bureaucracy associated with publishing on the WSU Site, it believes there must be a process of quality assurance for all material. In pursuit of this objective, departments and offices must establish quality assurance processes for their web pages for which they have responsibility. These processes must at least meet the Web Quality Assurance Requirements detailed below. 2. Web Quality Assurance Requirements Quality Assurance processes established by ant department or office of the University must:
Information contained within official or personal pages should not breach the copyright laws. Due care should be taken in linking to other Sites not to violate copyright laws. Persons publishing information on the Site should be aware of:
a. Giving away their own intellectual property by openly publishing research findings or designs for example. Where a staff member wishes to use copyright material on the Site, prior written approval must be gained from the holder of the copyright. All such approvals should be lodged with the head or other designated officer within their faculty or division, and with the University Copyright Officer. Staff is recommended to refer to the information provided by the WSU Library on Electronic Copyright and the Internet (see: http://www.winona.edu/library/copyright/INDEX.HTM.) The graphic images, HTML, and contents of this website are owned and copyrighted by Winona State University. Use of these images on websites outside of the Winona.edu domain is strictly prohibited. If you would like to use graphical images, prior written approval must be gained. 7.5 Security By its nature, web publishing can be accessed worldwide. It is possible to restrict access to sections of the information by the use of user names and passwords. The disclosure of passwords to any party is considered a breach of these regulations. 7.6 Confidential Information Confidential information must not be published on any web server without prior approval of the person responsible for such information and must be protected by Username and Password security. 7.7 Commercial Activities University web facilities or infrastructure must not be used for commercial purposes or private financial gain. 7.8 Personal Home Pages All official information relating to staff and students of the University must be published as official university pages. Personal home pages of staff and students of WSU, while not regarded as official pages, must be published in accordance with this policy. The United States Government introduced Telecommunications Act of 1996. One aim of the Act is to encourage the development of technologies which maximizes user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet, other interactive computer services and to ensure that the telecommunications facilities of public institutions are only used by staff and students (a university's immediate circle) for the research, teaching and administrative purposes of the university. Persons are not permitted to use a University's telecommunication facilities for private or commercial purposes. Staff and student cannot mount personal web pages that are not associated with their role within their university, e.g. web pages that promote personal commercial activities of staff of the activities of a community group that could avail themselves of a private provider. Personal pages for staff and students may only deal with information and activities related to:
1. A staff member's discipline area, teaching, research activities or other responsibilities associated with the employment position held by the person. Personal pages on the WSU Site must:
a. Not use the University logo or title. Once a user ceases to have a University computer account, the user's personal page will be deleted. 7.9 Legal Framework The attention of those who publish information on the Site is drawn to various United States legislation, which relates to computer usage. Whilst there is no specific legislation in force, the following relevant legislation would have direct applicability to WSU's Web Site: The Telecommunications Act 1996 7.10 Compliance All staff and students of the University together with other authorized users are required to comply with this policy. International, Federal, State and Local laws and the rules and regulations of the University as established by the Board of Governors, shall take precedence over any policies contained within this document. Any publication or application on the Site, which infringes this policy or significantly restricts or impacts on resources available to others, will be removed from the Site on the authority of the Director of Publications, until the problem is resolved. Serious breaches of this policy will constitute a breach of University regulations, whether or not an offense under the above the laws are committed. Examples of Policy Infringements Example 1: Clearly illegal: Any page that promotes extortion or child pornography. These pages will be immediately removed by the Webmaster from the Site and appropriate legal action taken. Example 2: Clearly Offensive: Any page that promotes and displays blatant and active racism and sexism will be immediately removed by the Webmaster from the Site and, if necessary, University disciplinary action may be taken. Example 3: Excessive resource consumption: If a page is so resource intensive as to pose a CPU performance or network bottleneck, the page will be closed as an emergency by the Web Administrator until the problem can be solved. Example 4: Offensive to some: Pages that display men or women in nude or semi-nude poses or contain 'crude' language may be offensive to some users. Academic staff, who wish to mount on the Site visual materials or text that constitute a part of their teaching or research, but which may be offensive to some users of the Site, should ask for their area of Site to have access restricted to the students and staff involved in the activity for which the material is being used. Where there is no justifiable academic purpose for such material, its display on the Site will be strongly discouraged. Where a person finds material on the Site offensive, she/he should put their complaints in writing to the WSU Webmaster who will refer the complaint to the Director of Publications. The Committee will seek a justification from the page owner and, if necessary, other staff as to why the 'offending' pages should remain on the Site. 7.11 Technical Guidelines
1. Browsers
2. Servers
a. The servers contain no official or accredited information of the University.
3. Images
4. Definitions
Webmaster:
Page Owner:
Quality Assuror:
Publishing:
Electronic Information:
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