Unit 2 CMS at Kent State

Library Hi Tech Vol 24 No. 1, 2006 “Building a local CMS at Kent State” by Rick Wiggins, Jeph Remley and Tom Klingler p69 -101

I selected the article cited above to read in full because I thought it would be an excellent opportunity to learn the operational details of a library CMS (Content Management System). I wasn't disappointed. The authors take the reader through a step by step process of building a CMS for library web development. The fundamental reason for implementing a CMS in the library environment is the recognition that a library's web site is a core service and that web development and maintenance is as equally important, complex and challenging as the work involved in operating the library's OPAC and ILS

The Kent State Libraries and Media Services web site team (LMS) found that there was a profound need to improve the structure and the integrity of the KS web site. The increasing number of pages, links, e-resources and user expectations made old processes and workflows obsolete. The old methods of updating and maintaining the web site were no longer sustainable. Scalability issues had overwhelmed web development and a radically different methodology was required to automate library web page content and metadata. Hence the need for a CMS.

To their credit, the LMS team included their core users , university staff, faculty and students as key participants in crafting a new web site which would be administered through the CMS. Focus groups and participant surveys generated feedback so that the KS LMS team didn't fall into the trap on relying exclusively upon the expertise and expectations of librarians.

A key moment in the development process was the conclusion by the LMS team that no open source or commercial CMS was available that would meet all the project's requirements. So the KS team developed their own CMS.

The largest part of the article provides in extraordinary detail the features and workflows of the KS CMS. I will spare the reader these details. However, as I reflected on this article, it became obvious to me that the KS CMS as described by the authors is very much a top down expert system. That is the CMS is completely dependent upon the expertise of the library staff. After its launch, the KS CMS doesn't include end users as active participants in the generation of content. A lot of what is described in the KS CMS project, while it would delight many librarians, I think generally runs counter to the philosophy articulated in last week's Clay Shirky reading.

To be fair the article was written in 2005 and published in 2006, light years ago in digital time, (yet Shirky's remarkable article was also written in 2005), well before social media became the dominant factor it is today. The KS article describes a CMS process that is a triumph of taxonomy and professional expertise. Folksonomy, and crowd sourcing are never mentioned as considerations, and personalization is only a vague hope requiring a new centralized authentication system. I think the authors would write a radically different article today.