How is Academic Catalog Management Different from Content Management?

We're often asked what differentiates a true academic catalog management solution from generic content management software. We're happy to answer that question! After all, virtually all of our 160-plus customers use content management software to publish their general Website, but they use Acalog™ to manage and present both their print and e-catalogs. There must be a reason, right? Read on…

Generic content management systems are designed to publish content as "pages" of information. List courses? Create a "page". Add a new course? Update the "page" — and perhaps also update 10 or 20 program "pages". That's no better than using Microsoft® Word, and we've heard from hundreds of people about how tedious that can be.

Here's the background: When we looked at creating a more efficient way for managing academic catalogs, including the need to publish an interactive e-catalog while supporting the need to print, we noticed several very important things that distinguish academic information from typical narrative content on college and university Websites.

  • We discovered that the organization of academic information at colleges and universities is very structured and hierarchical. A university has schools and colleges, they have departments, and departments have courses. Majors may belong to either colleges or to departments, depending on the structure of the institution.
  • Not all academic information is just "pages" of narrative content. Courses are data, and programs also lend themselves to being managed as data (including references to courses).
  • Since course information is typically stored as distinct data points in your SIS, we should store it that way in Acalog™, and provide you with ways to control the way the data points are arranged using a template for precisely consistent display of course details.
  • We also noticed that course information is repeated frequently across a large number of majors, programs, and degree plans. By using a database, we can free you from having to repeat course information over and over again as is required in "page"-based content management systems. You should never have to edit a program to simply modify a course; it should happen automatically when you modify the course itself.
  • We observed that while majors, programs, and degree plans are all unique, they contain concentrations that are lists of courses. And in some cases, those lists of courses, such as a general education requirement, may be identical across a large set of programs. Just like courses, you should be able to reference the shared content, update it in one place, and have it automatically updated everywhere, correctly and instantly.

Understanding this helped us realize that the tremendous power of a relational database could be used to help catalog managers eliminate weeks of tedious work chasing edits around a catalog. Why should you have to edit 30 programs to change a single course description? You shouldn't. And with Acalog™ you don't!

But that's not all. Acalog™ also supports the ability to use categories to have the system automatically organize and display content. Programs have program types and degree types, courses have course types. Departments "own" certain courses (and/or prefixes). Acalog™ uses this information to supply you with literally dozens of different templates to display your content on "pages" that are automatically maintained by the system. This means you can create a page or catalog section that lists all of your programs, but you never have to key in any information to create the page — it's all handled by the system! If you add or remove a program, the template page that lists programs is automatically updated by the system. Instantly. And you can easily chose to reorganize your content by changing a template's properties. Let's say you set the programs template to list the programs alphanumerically and now need to have them organized according to degree type. All you need to do is edit the template properties, check off "sort by degree type", save, and the change is instantly made to the page. You just reordered perhaps hundreds of programs with the flick of a switch. No editing, no cut-and-pasting, and no errors!

Furthermore, these advantages are directly available when you export from Acalog™ into Microsoft® Word. All of the filters, relationships, and course references are used by the system to export exactly the same content managed in the database directly into a linear print format. You'll never need to make edits or revisions in a Word document ever again, but you get all the advantages of being able to export your complete, revised catalog into a Word document with the push of a button.

The Acalog™ Academic Catalog Management System™. Nothing else even comes close.

We invite you to learn more about this unique product to discover how its intuitive workflows and robust features can help your organization simplify the academic catalog management process. Schedule a live demonstration today!