The corporate identity of Italian Universities on the Web: A webometrics approach

In parallel with the increasing marketisation and globalisation of higher education, Universities’ corporate websites have become institutional virtual storefronts largely contributing to reinforcing the organisations’ brand, to disseminate information on their main achievements and to communicate with both enrolled students and potential “customers” worldwide. Thus, the effectiveness of Universities’ websites to deliver value in terms of information on the organisations’ activities and to interact with actual and potential students - as well as partner institutions in education and research projects - is to be regarded as a key objective of all Universities. The level of accomplishment of this task, measured so far mostly on a case-study basis, can be more extensively surveyed by adopting a webometric approach combining the use of web analytics as indicators of efficiency with selected indicators of contents collected through web scraping techniques. This approach has been tested on the websites of Italian Universities with the aim of classifying them in terms of quality and impact of their institutional websites, as well as to develop a permanent monitoring framework.