Advancing Water Resources Research and Management
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Advancing Water Resources Research and Management |
| Symposium on Water Resources and the World Wide Web |
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| Seattle, Washington, December 5-9, 1999 |
Color convention for links in this document:
Two external websites are the subject of this paper:
 Water Resources at Oregon State University |
 Hydrophiles, Oregon State University |
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Research and teaching in water resources are found in multiple science, engineering, and social science departments at Oregon State University (OSU). This diversity provides a strong foundation for a graduate water resources program, but hinders effective flow of information and recognition of water resources as a common career path. Two websites have been created by students to unite and inform the academic hydrology and water resources community at OSU. The first website is focused on the student chapter of AWRA and AIH, and includes narratives of field trips, student profiles, alumni profiles, and chapter business. The second website describes OSU's academic offerings in water resources. An online database common to both websites provides the user with searchable listings of all water resources departments, personnel, and courses, and is a powerful tool for planning degree programs and increasing collaboration. Web forms allow the user community to update information themselves, distributing the maintenance workload and enhancing accuracy. Our approach to unifying information from multiple subdisciplines under water resources can also serve as a model for communicating information in other multidisciplinary fields. The websites have created as well as served demand for increased recognition of water resources as a distinct academic field, and are part of an ongoing effort to gain major degree status for hydrology and water resources at OSU.
KEYWORDS: Student chapter, Academic, Graduate, Database, ColdFusion
Our society recognizes water as a key environmental issue. Graduate education in water resources can better serve this need if it has an overall structure and coherent presentation of the core academic disciplines within it. At Oregon State University (OSU), graduate education in hydrology and water resources is diverse and decentralized, with nine departments in five colleges having major emphasis in water resources teaching and research. Currently there is no major degree at OSU with hydrology or water resources in its title. Meanwhile, society and the science community increasingly recognize hydrology and water resources as a distinct field (National Research Council; 1991, 1998). Current and prospective students and faculty expect good coordination as well as completeness in offerings at OSU. With people, courses, and research projects distributed across campus, it is difficult to appreciate the breadth and depth of OSU's graduate education opportunities in water resources. Tools are needed to 1) improve communication between students and faculty working in water resources, 2) present a coherent and searchable listing of academic offerings, and 3) improve recruitment and alumni relations.
Past efforts to address these needs have not been sufficient. A Water Resources Minor degree, an Environmental Sciences degree, and a couple of seminar series are offered at OSU, but otherwise water resources education is organized at the department level and presented with the particular emphasis of the department. A few faculty are working to increase collaboration and promote a better overall offering in water resources, but so far there has been limited success in comprehensively building and promoting the academic program.
To help address these problems, a small group of students decided to work on a bottom-up approach, consisting of two main thrusts. First, we organized ourselves into an American Water Resources Association (AWRA) and American Institute of Hydrology (AIH) student chapter and created a student-oriented website to support our activities. The student chapter website enables us to share ideas and experiences, find students and alumni with similar research and life interests, and provide a repository for chapter information so that continuity is maintained amidst a constant flux of students. It is informal and less "official." Second, we developed an academic-oriented website to share information on water resources education, for the benefit of the overall university. The academic website provides information about courses, faculty, departments, seminars, and other aspects of water resources education at OSU, and is more formal and "official."
A powerful feature of both websites is an online database, easily accessible for both information retrieval and information updating. Students and faculty not only use the information, but also update it themselves. The database is in Microsoft Access and we maintain tables for students, faculty, courses, departments, and menu/keyword values. Allaire Corp.'s ColdFusion (CF) is the software that works with the web server to access the database (Allaire Corp. 1999). CF tags look similar to HTML and when web pages containing them are opened, the CF tags are processed by the server software and a pure HTML page is returned to the client's web browser. The database minimizes the use of static HTML coding and makes it possible to access information in multiple ways. Except for a small amount of outside help with graphic design and query language programming, the entire project was initiated, planned, and carried out by the student authors without extensive web experience.
We also utilize email to serve the OSU water resources community. ListServ email lists for students, faculty, staff, and alumni allow users to communicate time-sensitive or "must-see"information immediately, while the websites are a better medium for sharing information of lasting value. Email subscription services are conveniently available in the websites.
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The website of "Hydrophiles", our AWRA and AIH student chapter, is designed to publicize our activities, allow students to learn each other's interests and get advice, allow alumni to find each other, and to store chapter information in a central "place" easily accessible across campus. Our most popular activities are field trips to points of hydrological interest in the Pacific Northwest. The website contains a detailed narrative of each field trip, including key facts and discussion of the water resources problem. Photos and other images from the trip are linked from the narrative and opened in separate display windows using Javascript.
A Student Profiles page lists water resources students by department and provides links to individual profiles containing biographical and contact information, research interests, and advice for fellow students. Webpage contents are generated dynamically from the database, and the user can link to forms for adding, updating, or converting their profile to alumni status. A similar Alumni Profiles section allows former students to locate each other and current students to network with working professionals. Content includes contact information, career and personal interests, and career development advice.
Other pages in the student chapter website provide the following:
Documentation of a service project performed by Hydrophiles for the community is a planned future addition to the student chapter website. The service project will include restoration and ongoing monitoring of a local riparian zone.
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The academic website was created to provide a central source of information about the multidisciplinary field of hydrology and water resources at OSU. Users can find courses, faculty, and departments of interest, and can link to more detailed information. Most information is contained and accessed from the database, making updates easier and allowing selective searches. In the past, students frequently complained that they could do a better job of putting together their graduate program if only they knew about other resources on campus. The website makes looking beyond one's department or college and grasping the whole picture much easier. Faculty find the website helpful for locating colleagues, as well as making their job as advisors to students easier. The added clarity the website brings to campus should also help OSU compete more effectively in the higher education marketplace.
A Departments page provides current information on key OSU departments offering water resources education. Content includes a description of the department's involvement in water resources, plus contact information and links.
A Faculty page alphabetically lists all faculty involved in water resources, and provides brief profiles on each, including appointment and contact information, and keywords describing research and teaching interests under six categories: Broad Interest, Element of Water Cycle, Application to Society, Type of Process, Spatial Scale, and Methodology. A separate faculty search page allows the user to search for faculty based on these keywords. Javascript was used to customize the checkbox behavior in this and other search forms so that properly formed queries will always be obvious to the user and sent to the database. Approximately 150 faculty are included in the database.
A Courses search page allows the user to find all the courses matching their criteria. The user can search for courses based on the same keywords used to describe faculty interests, or by other criteria, such as category for AIH certification.
Searching with the criteria shown on the search page yields one course. Information returned from the database includes keywords used to describe the course, and primary schedule information. Also included are links to the professor's online syllabus (if any) and the central University database providing catalog description and additional schedule information. By combining central University links with our water resources content, we eliminate duplication of information and provide more effective previewing of course content. Approximately 85 courses are included in the database.
Other information pages are direct HTML and are not served by the database. These provide the following:
From the beginning, a major objective of the website development was to put as much of the information maintenance as possible into the hands of faculty, staff, and students closest to the information. This reduces webmasters' workload to acceptable levels, improves accuracy, and encourages a sense of ownership among the users. To change the listing for a course, the faculty or staff member simply goes to the Update/Add/Delete page. Here, the course that resulted from the above search is taken as an example. After entering the password, another form is presented with the current information displayed and ready to change. Pull-down menus and checkboxes are used as much as possible to maximize convenience and minimize errors. In this example, "Watershed analysis" is added as a keyword under the Application category. The next page displays the modified information and asks for confirmation, and is followed by a thank you page, with links back to the beginning or the course listings. A similar sequence of forms is used to change database information on faculty, departments, students, and alumni.
A hidden manual page summarizes the website and database design for the benefit of webmasters. The following topics are addressed in our manual page:
The manual page also serves as guidance for outside parties who ask to borrow features of our website. Requests for ColdFusion code must be made to the webmasters because these files are translated to HTML before being sent by the web server. Anonymous ftp access to these files is unavailable.
Future additions to the academic website will include more detailed information about water resources degrees at OSU, as well as information about offerings at other campuses in the Oregon University System. A more rigorous evaluation of the site's effectiveness is also needed. In the near future we will transfer ownership of this website to the state water institute on campus.
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Both websites were developed entirely by the graduate student authors, with a little outside assistance for graphical design and solving particular database access problems. We also recieved important moral support and design advice from members of our advisory committee. Although the project has not been part of our degree programs, we've had the satisfaction of leaving a valuable legacy at OSU, receiving the appreciation of our colleagues, and gaining web development experience.
Our estimates of person-hours spent on various components of the project is given below. We had to learn HTML and ColdFusion from scratch and did not have the benefit of using a similar, previously developed application as a template. Certainly others starting with a example like ours could develop their application much faster.
| Database and ColdFusion pages | Other webpages | |
| Student chapter website | 60 | 100 |
| Academic website | 400 | 80 |
The main difficulties with developing the websites have been in getting:
Our parent professional societies, AWRA and AIH, have been very supportive of the project. The student chapter site has boosted their membership, and the academic site includes course designations for AIH certification. Both sites contribute to overall professional awareness on our campus.
Maintenance of the student chapter website is relatively simple and will be handed down to members. The academic site is more involved and we are still making arrangements for its long-term maintenance. Continued quality requires a high profile and regular maintenance, and we believe it is essential for a classified, career employee to assume overall responsibility for website management. Although most of the information in the database can be maintained by anyone with a web browser, the HTML pages that are not produced from the database still require HTML authoring for maintenance. Budget limitations and lack of basic web development skills among classified staff are hurdles we are trying to overcome in transferring ownership of the academic website.
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The student chapter and academic websites unify the water resources community at Oregon State University, allow us to build bridges based on topic rather than academic units, and communicate our programs to the public. The primary users of the websites are current students, prospective students, and faculty. The Courses and Student Profiles pages are the most popular, with about 300 hits each after one month of use. User comments from faculty and staff indicate that the academic website saves time and improves advising of students. Our database and the web pages that access it provide a particularly useful tool for planning graduate programs, keeping track of institutional offerings, and simply looking up contact information. The database and input forms also make it easier to delegate updating of information out to the user community rather than placing all of the burden on webmasters. Our approach to unifying information from multiple academic disciplines under a common theme can serve as a model for communicating information in other multidisciplinary fields. We have been approached by OSU colleagues wanting to set up similar websites for the fields of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resources. Besides improving the experiences of students and faculty at OSU, the websites offer other benefits to the University, such as highlighting overlap and deficiencies in academic programs, attracting greater numbers of students, and boosting alumni involvement and giving. Future development will encompass student service projects, and water resources programs and student activities of other campuses in the Oregon University System, notably Portland State University and University of Oregon.
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We gratefully acknowledge our sources of support for this project. Travel to the AWRA Symposium on Water Resources and the WWW was funded by the Oregon Water Resources Research Institute (OWRRI). OWRRI also funded graphic design assistance. Our web development advisory committee included Stephanie Moret/OWRRI and John Faustini/Geosciences. John Bolte/Department of Bioresource Engineering (BRE) provided server and software support, and help on knotty programming tasks. Finally, we express our appreciation for the enthusiasm, vision, and leadership of John Selker/BRE in the water resources community at Oregon State University.
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Ben
Jacob
Department of Bioresource Engineering
116 Gilmore Hall
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331
Phone: (541) 737-6314 FAX: (541) 737-2082
Timothy E. Link
Environmental Sciences Graduate Program
Oregon State University
200 SW 35th Street
Corvallis, OR 97333
Phone: (541) 754-4452 FAX: (541) 754-4799
Email: tim@orst.edu
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