Information gateways need to be maintained in two key areas:

• collection management
• server integrity and functionality

Without adequate maintenance in these two areas a gateway is vulnerable to undermining its core aims and objectives; being a quality-controlled portal to online information resources. The key strength of an information gateway is in the quality of its data and the reliability of its service. Without adequate maintenance both of these areas are susceptible to developing weaknesses and problems.

Server integrity and functionality

All Web sites and services need some degree of Web server maintenance. A competent system administrator and Webmaster can easily carry out much of this technical maintenance. Additionally many maintenance tasks can be readily automated, thereby reducing the requirements for direct human intervention. However there is still a need for someone to keep an eye on things, such as monitor system performance and deal with any day-to-day maintenance issues that may arise. Without this maintenance there is a real risk that any problems with the Web server will not be picked up until users find them. If users experience regular problems with Web sites they are likely to loose trust in the sites in question. Loss of trust often results in lost users.

Information gateways have the additional requirement that they need regular and sometimes extensive maintenance of the resource catalogue. Because the resource catalogue is at the heart of the gateway (it is the very reason why people use the gateway), then failure to maintain this aspect of the gateway can lead to serious problems in quality of service and content. Problems in this area directly effect user confidence in the gateway. Without user confidence and quality assurance gateways can rapidly loose users and fail to attract new ones.

Collection management

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, a catalogue of Internet resources is going to require a certain degree of maintenance in order to keep the catalogue up to date. Online resources come and go, are available one day and not the next (the fluidity of many online documents is detailed elsewhere - Collection management). This makes collection management an important part of any gateway's maintenance requirements.

Collection management

Estimating maintenance requirements for an information gateway can be a difficult task. Key factors that should be considered are:

• what is the scope of the gateway?
• how quickly is the gateway resource catalogue scheduled to grow?
• what is the perceived lifetime of the gateway?
• how heavily will the gateway be used?

Generally the larger the scope, the quicker the scheduled growth, the longer the lifetime and the more heavily used the gateway is the more maintenance will be required.

Server integrity and functionality

Server maintenance will be largely constant regardless of the size of the gateway. If the gateway has its own dedicated server then there will be basic machine level administration tasks. If the gateway is hosted virtually (i.e. multiple Web sites on the same machine), then a large proportion of the maintenance will be shared with other sites on that machine.

For more details on hardware and software maintenance see the System requirements specifics, hardware and software chapter.

System requirements specifics, hardware and software

Virtual hosting maintenance can be as little as a few hours a week of staff effort, sometimes even less. Dedicated servers are going to require more maintenance but with the right planning and set-up the maintenance requirements can be kept below one day per week in staff effort.

These low levels of maintenance can be achieved only with careful planning and setting up of the gateway from the start. Obviously when problems arise (they do even for the best-planned gateway) maintenance requirements can be considerably more time consuming.

Collection management

Collection management and associated maintenance requirements are closely linked to the size of the catalogue and resources database. Validating records, link checking and updating resource descriptions will be related to the number of records that are being dealt with. As the catalogue grows expect to spend 10-15% of the overall cataloguing time on collection management maintenance and related tasks.

R E M E M B E R General Web sites often require an unexpectedly high level of maintenance. It has been estimated that "as a rule of thumb, the annual maintenance budget for a website should be about the same as the initial cost of building the site, with 50 percent as an absolute minimum." Jakob Nielsen: 1997 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9706b.html

Jakob Nielsen Top Ten Mistakes of Web Management. Alertbox, June 15 1997. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9706b.html

Chapter author: Martin Belcher