I interviewed an Electronic Resource and Systems Librarian
for a small four year liberal arts college in Ohio. The FTE is around 1200
students and there is a small distance learning component that is under
development. This librarian is a recent graduate of the University of Missouri
Columbia MLIS program and this is his first full time library job. His prior
background is in IT which helped him focus his education on the technical side
of the library. However, the college where he works has a very small library
staff; only four full time employees. This has resulted in a need for every
librarian to be a jack of all trades.
This interview was a wonderful experience. My interviewee is
a user of Joomla, and I was therefore able to follow a lot of his points since
I am somewhat familiar with that system. It was really nice to hear about
someone applying what I’ve learned in this class in a very practical and
meaningful way. Below is a transcription of our communication.
How and where did you hear about CMS?
Content management systems have been on the radar for some
time now in both library circles but also predominately in the small business
community. Applications like Wordpress and Drupal have been used extensively by
individuals and small business to provide an easy and affordable way to provide
a web presence without the requirement of a dedicated IT team. My first
personal exposure to CMS was in creating some blogs through Wordpress for some
friends of mine. Wordpress has been one the highest profile systems because of
its use in the blogosphere as well as it's comparative simplicity in
implementing the software. Not to mention that Wordpress doesn't require you to
provide a hosting service for small sites. I believe it was mentioned in my
programs classes a number of times, however you never think that you are going
to be in the situation to roll out a entire CMS library site until you are
sitting in a meeting and they all turn and look at you!
What were your motivations to adopt a CMS for the library’s website?
Prior to my arrival at the college where I work, a decision
was made to upgrade the colleges website.
One thing you need to be aware of is the disconnect between the College
site and the libraries new site which is still in development). These two
domains share a relation only that someday they will live on the same server
and fall under the umbrella of the College. The college has developed their
site almost completely independently of ours, even the database is separate.
The libraries current website is very very old code. It was
straight HTML with very little css supporting code and absolutely no js. It was
originally developed in 2003 to 2004 and has grown into a Frankensteinian
monster since then. It needs to be put out to pasture because it had/has some
very significant problems.
1)
It was time consuming and unwieldy to add content.
2)
Updating any page required some knowledge of html which removed regular
librarians from the process.
3)
If any restructuring was to be done, such as changing a url, every
location in every page needed to be reworked. There are over 400 pages of this
code to work with. This is impossible.
4)
It looked as old as it was. In the digital age, where very often the age
of a website, and thus the relevance of the content cannot be determined by a
publication date, the only other method people have for determining if the info
is still valid is how the site looks. Ours looked like it was out of date.
Additional considerations included data that has suggested that
dynamic and content rich sites with frequent additions to the pages yield more
'hits'. In other words, we saw that the librarians would need to get more
involved in content creation on the website and couldn't do this easily with
the old site.
What was your decision-making criteria? What is the name of
the CMS you used?
Ultimately we had several choices with regard to what CMS
to use. However it came about in an odd way because of the aforementioned
disconnect between the college site and the libraries. We were ultimately given
the option of going with Joomla and a custom template for it (the colleges
choice), and picking something else. That something else was Libguides.
I believe that the primary decision making criteria was the
following:
1. Can the system accomplish
the mission of the library without massive recoding?
u This required us to really ask ourselves what is it that
we wanted in the new site. Was it just a link of links? Did we want content
that could be added by patrons? Did we want it to resemble the college site?
It turns out that it just needed a little less than
massive recoding... good news!
2.
Is it simple to learn?
More important to the regular librarians than it was for
me, the idea here was that we would need to train the librarians to add
content. If it was too difficult it wouldn't be used.
3.
How much did it cost?
We are a small college library, every cent counts. We were
by no means against spending money on a new system, however if one could be
found that could do the same with no overhead it would be preferred.
4.
Was there support?
This was another factor that revolved around us being
small. We needed to leverage other experiences if major issues cropped up. It
would not do well to have a system that got only minimal support, or wasn't
used for libraries before either. It wasn't enough that the new CMS was working
in the field in other ways, it had to be developed somewhere else as a library
site.
Finally we decided on Joomla. First it was the same system
that the college decided upon so there was not going to be much issue on a
wildly different design. Secondly Joomla is free. Outside the need to get it
hosted the Joomla software is Open Source which allows us to save money as well
as change the code without getting into sticky legal situations. Additionally
Joomla had been used in many other libraries over the past few years so there
was some precedent for it working the way we wanted. Congruent with that was
the knowledge that Joomla has been hugely successful in small business sites as
well as not for profits which meant a large body of support.
In my mind the stumbling block was the simple to learn part.
It happens to be a catch-22.
Joomla, and many other Content management systems rely upon
the setup to do the bulk of the work. Joomla's method is in the use of a
template which sets up how the site looks and where content can go. The
template is the problem. While using Joomla to add content is not difficult it
requires that a template for how the site will look to be in place and working
the way you want it to.
This means that it has been simple for the users to learn,
however the programmer, me, has had a lot of work to do in getting the site into
the shape we want it to be in.
What are the important benefits or advantages of Joomla over other CMS systems you've used in the past?
Some of this was answered above but a few things bear
underscoring. The clear major advantage of Joomla was that it wasn't
predisposed to create a particular kind of website. For example Wordpress is
great for creating blogs but doesn't do other things very well at all. Drupal comes closest to the feature
list of Joomla and it appears it is a toss up which one many libraries go with.
In fact I believe that Miami of Ohio's site is Drupal.
How was the learning curve?
This is the million dollar question in my mind.
The learning curve for regular users is pretty short. If the
programmer does their job right it should be simple to create basic content and
add it to the system. However more complicated work should probably be left to
a person that has more in depth knowledge of the system.
If you are creating a site from scratch however, Joomla is
not a one size fits all solution. In order to make it look exactly the way you
want, and even add some more complicated features you will need to know HTML
and CSS. In some cases maybe even Javascript. The basics of Joomla are pretty
straightforward but it does take some time to learn the ins and outs of the
system to make it really work for you. Especially if you don't want it to look
too generic.
