UC To Refresh Web Site Design

A revamped Undergraduate Council Web site will be making its debut at 11:59 tonight, pending final approval by the UC this evening.

The refurbished site, uc.fas.harvard.edu, will include such new features as an official UC blog and an online archive of past UC documents, Council President Ryan A. Petersen ’08 said yesterday.

The archive innovation is a product of the labors of UC Student Affairs Committee Chairman Michael R. Ragalie ’09, who used a feed-scanner to compile digital images of 10 years of UC legislation, minutes, agendas, and correspondence, and then did the programming to make the 200 documents—dating from 1982 to 1992—searchable.

“The original goal was to have a way for council members to look at our history so that when they are proposing ideas, they can gain wisdom from the past,” Ragalie said. His interface uses search technology that allows readers to find keywords anywhere in the body of a document and includes an option to filter queries by the type of document desired or the session of council from which it dates.

Ragalie, who said that UC documents from 1992 onward would continue to be scanned into the online archive database during the semester, recalled that the work of compiling the new application was not just dreary busywork. One piece of old correspondence that he remembers fondly has former University President Derek C. Bok defending to a UC representative his decision not to take part in a dunking booth event.

The site’s other fresh feature—a blog for council business—is not altogether novel. A similar feature was added to the site in May 2006 only to fall quickly into disrepair.

“I don’t know whether more than half a dozen people ever visited that blog in its whole existence,” said UC Representative Matthew R. Greenfield ’08, who was a contributor to the 2006 blog.

Greenfield added that while “there’s actually a lot of people subscribed to [the] UC-general [e-mail list], so it’s not inconceivable that observers of the UC would pay attention to new media,” he doubted that the new blog would get much traffic.

“I can’t imagine a whole lot of people going out of their way to see what particular UC members are saying about ongoing UC issues,” he said.

Fixing the old Web site, which had changed little since its inception in 2003, has been a priority since at least 2005, when former UC President Matthew J. Glazer ’06 informed the council that “our Web site is terrible and in dire need of fixing.”

Petersen, who himself referred to the overhaul of the Web site as “a priority since day one,” first issued a request for proposals for the new site in June, receiving five bids ranging as high as $35,000. Tina Ye, a Tufts senior, was awarded the contract—$1,500 to be paid in two installments—after proposing the lowest bid.

Ye said yesterday that her ability to do the project so cheaply stemmed from the fact that she does not yet have to sustain herself through her professional income.

“I’m a student, I’m learning the trade and because of that I’m willing to accept a lower fee,” said Ye, who added that she was aiming for a “toned down, conservative look” for the UC site.

Part of Ye’s duties, beyond the redesign of the site, include coding it anew to allow for further development in the future.

Petersen, who noted that he would like to add mechanisms for quickly posting legislation and providing educational resources to students in a second phase of improvements to come later, said that the unwieldy coding of the previous Web site was a primary inhibitor to improvements in the past.

—Staff writer Christian B. Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu.