Dear WWW: interacting with the public through the World Wide Web

For many educational institutions the World Wide Web has become a major avenue of communication with its constituencies. Students, potential students, faculty, staff, people at other institutions and the general public are all directing their questions to the e‐mail address www@institution.edu The personnel that receive this mail are often ill‐prepared for the quantity and variety of questions that arrive. This paper examines the evolution of this problem over the first four years of UC Davis’ use of the Web, and presents some of the strategies that have proven useful for managing this onslaught.