Content and Workflow Management for Library Web Sites: Case Studies

Citation

Calvert, P. (2005), "Content and Workflow Management for Library Web Sites: Case Studies", The Electronic Library, Vol. 23 No. 5, pp. 617-618. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470510631353

This is a topic that has a market ready and waiting for the right book to come along. There must be one of those “laws” somewhere that says websites will grow unrestrained at a certain rate per year. Any information manager will have experienced the situation in which what was once a small website for the library, archive, or whatever, has grown so fast that it has outstripped attempts to “manage” it by a solo webmaster. As the editor explains very clearly, there is a limit to what can be done with software such as Dreamweaver, and once a site has grown in size, the content diversified and the number of contributors risen, a new method of web content management (WCM) must be found.

As the title makes plain, this is a book of case studies. All cases come from the USA, with one author from Canada. All but one of the cases are from university libraries, though there is a chapter based upon the development of the Tactical Electric Power Digital Library, a special‐purpose document repository and information resource website.

The WCM methods described in these cases vary quite widely. Some libraries have used complete content management systems (often using Java server pages, PHP or ColdFusion scripting), some have developed their own software tools specifically for WCM, and some have gone for a method based much more on human management of decentralised resources. There are two introductory chapters, one by Holly Yu and one by Johan Ragetli, that set out the needs and challenges, and the methods and tools available for WCM. As someone who was not sufficiently ready to read the detailed case studies, I found Ragetli's chapter an ideal introduction to the later chapters.

There is a disarming honesty in some of the chapters. You can hardly read Michelle Mach's report on website maintenance at Colorado State University without appreciating her acknowledgement that they haven't got it all right by any means, yet this is very useful to the reader because we then have much more confidence in what she says did work well.

There isn't a weak chapter in here, which is very unusual for a collection of this nature, and that must be due to the work of Holly Yu. Every chapter is well referenced and there is an adequate cumulated index. I can recommend this book to anyone interested in web content management for libraries.