What follows is the transcript of the interview that I conducted via email with an academic librarian about her usage of a Content Management System.
Interview Transcript
Corradino: How and where did you hear about CMSs?
Ms. Librarian: I heard about CMSs when I worked at [a public state university]. We did not have a content management system, and employees either coded by hand in notepad or wordpad or used Dreamweaver. Because there was a steep learning curve for either coding or using Dreamweaver properly, when CMSs came out, such as Drupal or Expression Engine, there was always talk of migrating to a CMS in order to streamline and simplify website updates.
Corradino: What were your motivations to adopt the CMS for its current use (library website or any other purpose?)
Ms. Librarian: In my current position, the University as a whole requires using a CMS if you are authorized to make edits to your department’s website. So, it came with the job.
Corradino: What is the name of CMS you are using now?
Ms. Librarian: OU Campus, which according to OminUpdate’s website “is the leading web content management system for higher education institutions.” OmniUpdate is the company’s name.
Corradino: Please describe your responsibilities and/or usage of the CMS? How often do you work with the CMS?
Ms. Librarian: I used the CMS to redesign the library’s home page and to create secondary pages in a pre-determined template. Most of the content for the secondary pages came from the old website with some updates. Depending on what projects I’m working on, I may work within the CMS a great deal during the week, such as off and on throughout the day, or I might go a few weeks without needing to work on web pages. Some of our pages were created outside of the content management system by an outside contractor because the pre-determined template did not offer a horizontal navigational bar, which we wanted to include on the libraries’ home page (there are three home pages, one unifying home page and one for each library; there are two libraries at the university in which I work).
Corradino: Are there any advantages or benefits of the CMS you are using now? Are there any features you really like?
Ms. Librarian: A CMS is good for employees who just need to make updates to pages with straight-forward information, such as a staff directory. The OUCampus interface looks and behaves very much like the LibGuides interface, so it may be a good CMS for librarians to use. I code by hand within the CMS, meaning that I switch to HTML view and type in code. I really like having access to CSS stylings that are pre-determined and easy to apply. For example, I can easily create a tabbed search box, accordions, and other “fancy” features by adding code that my institution has made available via a website. Correctly applying this code, however, sometimes requires coding experience, so the average user might get frustrated with this while I really enjoy it.
Corradino: Are there any disadvantages or features you don’t like and why?
Ms. Librarian: When you “publish” a page, the interface will sometimes make changes to code that it doesn’t understand, so, for example, sometimes it “breaks” the code for the RSS feed, and we have to go back in and fix it.
Corradino: How is the learning curve? Do you think your CMS is “user-friendly?”
Ms. Librarian: The learning curve will differ depending on the person’s background. Anyone with coding experience can easily use this CMS; anyone with experience creating pages in LibGuides would have an advantage as well. It’s user-friendly for the most part for me, but another person might have trouble with it.
Corradino: Given the choice, would you stay with your current CMS, or choose another, or none at all? Why?
Ms. Librarian: Because I don’t have experience with another CMS, it’s difficult to answer this question. What I would like, instead, is the choice of more templates. But those would have to be created by university IT.
Corradino: Please feel free to add any additional opinions, information or advice.
Ms. Librarian: I would advise anyone who wants to create web pages to learn basic HTML and CSS. Even if you use a content management system, if you know code, troubleshooting problems is much easier.
Interview Reflection
Throughout my time working on my Master of Library and Information Science, one theme has been resoundingly clear: learn as many technology skills as you can, you are going to need them. A library’s web page is such an integral part of delivering information to patrons, that library professionals must acquire some of the necessary skills to create and maintain them. A quick scan of professional librarian positions will also give you an indication of how valuable these skills are to making yourself a marketable candidate. While studying applied technology in libraries, we have been discussing Content Management Systems (CMS) which are programs that allow even the novice user the ability to create a web page. One does not need to know any programming languages or code in order to add and edit content as they are mostly WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs. I recently had the pleasure of communicating with a librarian from a Georgia public university about her usage of the university Content Management System (CMS). She uses the CMS to upload and maintain content on the library’s webpage. She declined to have her name listed publicly, so to protect her identity, I will refer to her as Ms. Librarian. Ms. Librarian does have coding experience and working knowledge of HTML and CSS.
Content Management Systems (CMS) are something that I have only recently begun to learn about, though I have been glad to get the experience working with these programs. Ms. Librarian mentions that before organizations started utilizing CMSs, employees had to hand code their webpages. Considering that this probably took a considerable amount of time if employees did not already have these skills, it is no surprise that many organizations are choosing to use a CMS instead of developing a webpage from scratch. She also mentions that in her current position, the university requires employees to use the CMS to add content to their department’s page. This does seem advantageous for the university, because they can easily ensure some amount of uniformity to all the site pages.
Ms. Librarian’s university uses the OminUpdate product, OU Campus, so I checked out their website. You have to create an account in order to watch the videos, but you can learn some basic information about the features of the products. I have worked a little with Joomla!, and this product appears to be very similar, only tailored for universities. Course catalogs and faculty directories are some typical feature one would certainly expect to find on a university webpage, and can be incorporated in the OU Campus CMS. On the back end, users are able to view analytics which provide statistics on the pages such as the number of views and visitors. Ms. Librarian also stated that the templates were similar to LibGuides, which I know many librarians have probably had some exposure to. She also states that sometimes her coding knowledge does come in handy when working with the CMS. I had the same experience working with Joomla!. I never needed to switch to the “code view,” but knowing what was going on “behind the scenes,” made me feel like working with the program was a little easier. In fact, I often find myself these days on web pages and looking at their source code to see how they accomplished something.
Finally, Ms. Librarian closed with some advice: learn to code, at least the basics. This certainly echoes a lot of my library graduate school experience. Last semester I took an information architecture class and learned how to work with HTML and CSS. It was my first experience with any kind of coding or web page building and I loved it. I wish that I had taken the class sooner, because it made something that had felt so abstract and outside of my skill set, seem possible for me to accomplish. All in all, I am glad I got the chance to discuss CMSs with Ms. Librarian because it gave me an idea of how much this is a part of her everyday work flow. Now that I have had some experience working with a CMS, I am even gladder because these are skills that I too, will likely have to employ in my career. Who know, perhaps there is a technology degree in my future as well!
Please find the interview document here.
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