Student ambassadors 2012

On 1 August 2012 Univ’s website ran the headline “Univ heads to Sheffield”, a news item about nine of our Student Ambassadors on a road trip across South Yorkshire in order to help recruit more school applicants from the area.

It’s notable not only for its outreach ambitions but for being the oldest archived website news item and therefore now marking ten years of online College news.

Univ website 2002

In reality Univ has had a website since the mid-90s, the earliest iteration suggesting its pages were best “viewed in thousands of colours or better, and with Netscape Navigator 3.0/Internet Explorer 4.0 or later”. Unfortunately, we have no digital archive of the few news items published from that period, instead we start from the time of the next major website update in mid-2012; even then news publication was sporadic with the publication of just 30 stories in 2013, rising slowly to 80 in 2017.

Univ website 2012

With the launch of the current site in early 2018 and the creation of College’s current, stand-alone, Communications Department – Sara Dewsbery, Ariane Laurent-Smith, Justin Bowyer – news publication ramped up considerably and we now publish more than 300 stories a year, covering the whole range of news from our extended Univ Family.

In addition to our student and alumni news, there are regular Profile Features (almost 150 already online), dedicated Treasure Features courtesy of our Archivist and Library Team, Univ North stories, Book Reviews, Travel Reports and, our most recent addition, all-things sustainability related.

It’s an undeniable privilege to be able to report so widely on our collective College achievements and we look forward with great anticipation to the next ten years (viewed in thousands of colours or better…)

The Communications Team

Calling all Univ family members: Do you have news to share? Please get in touch via email communications@univ.ox.ac.uk

Published: 1 August 2022

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