Online Catalog

[Courtney Smolen]

Hi Everyone!

 

Our College plans to discontinue creating academic PDF catalogs and go straight to a full online version.

 

Besides St. John Fischer College's online catalog, are there any other institutions using the dotCMS that have an online catalog they can share with us as an example. We would like to collect some ideas on what we/dotCMS can do.

 

Thanks so much!

Courtney

[Paul Fairbanks]

Our catalog went online only last spring. We set up a few different structures for the different content types.
http://www.gettysburg.edu/academics/catalog/
There is one for our majors/minors that feeds the programs of study. The course listings are pulling from peoplesoft.
There is another structure for policies which is then broken down into policy types with a checkbox.
Because updates are ongoing, it has been easier for the registrar to make changes, though we do capture and print a copy once a year and remind faculty to submit changes before that happens.

[Courtney Smolen]

Thanks Paul for sharing! Hope to see you this Wednesday at the CUPRAP conference, if you're going.

[Steve Geggie]

Hi,

 

We just went live with our dotcms website.   I would be interested in understanding your approach to the online catalog using dotcms.    Was the catalog capability built, or was it a separate purchase, or something between?

 

Thanks for any insights,

Steve

 

[Courtney Smolen]

Hi Steve,

Sorry for such a delayed response! To answer your question, we created our online catalog, in-house through custom web page design and structure form creation, and importing our course listing and description via PowerCampus. It's a start of, what I'm sure will be, an evolution of how we handle our online catalog. You can view ours at www.cse.edu/catalog.

We received some pretty positive feedback about transferring our print catalog, online. The challenges that we do find include:

• How to archive online catalogs, now that we do not have a static PDF document;
• Automating any changes within program overviews and descriptions to match what is currently shown in the program landing pages.

Recently, I have begun a redesign project for our academic portion to the web site, which hopefully will address the second issue/challenge, in which the program landing pages will strictly be strategic ideas and outcomes of each program's objectives, linking directly to their portion within the online catalog, should users wish to know more information.

Hope this helps - I'd be happy to answer any other questions you may have. Again, sorry for the delay!

Courtney