Challenge
LIM College, located in New York City, is the nation's only College devoted to the business of fashion, and offers majors in Fashion Merchandising, Management, Marketing, and Visual Merchandising.
Prior to the adoption of Acalog, Department of Student Affairs faced a time-consuming task in revising and publishing the LIM College academic catalog. Revision cycles involved two major phases: extensive editing of the catalog documents, which usually occurred over several months, and then transferring content from the catalog documents to the school website. The latter took the remainder of the year to complete, as content was moved one piece at a time to every location of reference on the school's website. Carolyn Disnew, Registrar, explained that, "Getting the revised academic catalog onto the Web was a very difficult process. We would have to copy and paste each bit of content in at a time to all of the different places throughout the website that the information was found. It took a long period of time, and frequently tied up resources from both the Student Affairs and IT Departments. Due to the difficulty of maintaining the online catalog, the content did not change much from year to year."
In order to reduces expenses related to the revision and publishing process, Student Affairs Department managers were forced to create a 50-page mini-catalog, used mainly for recruitment purposes, but which failed to meet the need for a comprehensive resource for detailed catalog information. Faculty and students consequently were forced to search the Lim College Website to locate specific information that should be easily found in the catalog. "Our Website did offer a good amount of curricular information but was very difficult to navigate to the information you were looking for, and was not searchable," explained Ms. Disnew.
With these inconveniences in mind, the Student Affairs Department set out to identify a technology that would provide an improved online experience for visitors, while enabling the Student Affairs Department to more efficiently maintain and publish catalog information for presentation online and in print.
Solution
LIM College investigated various catalog management options, finding initially that most offerings were generic content management systems that had been repurposed for academic catalog management. The school was looking for a dedicated solution, designed from the ground up to support the unique needs for managing and presenting academic catalog information, which lead to a review of Acalog. Acalog is a best-of-breed solution, and is not offered for any other purpose than managing and presenting academic catalogs and related publications online, for print, and other emerging media channels, such as the mobile Web.
The Student Affairs Department found several features in Acalog which have proven to be indispensable, including the Web-based management environment, collaboration tools, granular permissions, seamless integration with the school Website, catalog-aware search, archiving capability, personalization, social media integration, and the ability to easily make corrections in real time, with the ability to publish new e-catalogs with no need to impose on Web or IT staff.
The Student Affairs Department evaluation team selected Acalog based on its ability to satisfy three essential criteria: 1) provide a platform from which to streamline the academic catalog revision process; 2) reduce the need for printed catalogs; and 3) elegantly present academic catalog content to students in an interactive e-catalog.
LIM College elected to have Digital Architecture provide consultation on the organization and hierarchy of their catalog curriculum, and implement Acalog. During the implementation process, the Student Affairs Department and other staff members attended Digital Architecture's comprehensive User Training Program. The initial reaction of Ms. Disnew and her team was that the Acalog software was very easy to use, and was by far the most user friendly software they had ever experienced at the school. "After only an hour of training our team was up and running with no trouble at all. Anyone on our staff can use it. It just makes sense," she said.
In the months that followed the implementation, the LIM College staff has realized much success utilizing Acalog’s task centered workflows and tools. "Before [Acalog], the [catalog] Website was just a lot of trouble to maintain. The new system has allowed us to re-organize our entire catalog revision process. When compared to our previous revision process, Acalog's workflows are much easier to negotiate. We are able to save a lot of time, and a lot of effort," explained Ms. Disnew.
"Within Acalog," says Ms. Disnew, "I am now able to break up the catalog into pieces, and virtually assign them to multiple editors in various departments, and then monitor the status of the content being edited. Once edits are complete, I can finalize the content, lock the content down, and publish the catalog instantly to the Web. I really like how Acalog eliminates the need for multiple entries of the same data. Catalog content (such as core courses and programs) can now be shared across multiple departments without a lot of endless copying and pasting.
"I have been exporting for weeks now and showed all of the editors how to do it too. I hate to say this, but our new e-catalog gateway works better than our website! It has a great search feature, and filters. It can also be linked to any type of resource. You could not do that with a paper catalog, nor could you manage that very easily with a typical HTML website."
View the Lim College e-catalog here: http://catalog.limcollege.edu/
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