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Re: "Archiving" University Course Catalogs



Folks,
Those of you that are thinking of going to on-line course catalogs ought to
contact Rob Spindler at Arizona State University (rob.spindler@asu.edu).  Rob is
the University Archivist there and gave a presentation last Fall on this topic.
ASU went to an on-line course catalog by administrative fiat and ran into
significant problems.  Some of the issues were: consistency of course description,
lack of version control, lack of central control of updates, problems of what and
when to archive, etc.  I don't remember all the details but they finally had to
shut down and regroup.  The problem with the distributed responsibility/authority
I seem to reading about in this thread is a lack of version control.  These
documents are (I think) in many ways contracts about what is being taught.  When
departments can change them on whim it becomes very problematical to determine
what "contract" was in force on what date.  I think what ASU found was that
departments began to post their own "course catalogs" which were in conflict with
the official University course catalog.  Since there was no version control or
formal schedule of updates at the University level no one new exactly what the
course offerings or content were on a particular date and they (as I noted) often
didn't match the departmental posting.  After all, why bother to submit to the
central course schedule when you can just update your departmental home page.
Archiving in a distributed system like I have been reading about would be a
nightmare I should think.  From Rob's description just doing that for the
centralized schedule was going to be enough of a nightmare.  In some ways the
e-version of course catalogs could make answering those questions about "what was
the description of the course I took 10 years ago" a possibility (if we can figure
out the archiving) but not if there are (or were) multiple versions of the catalog
that exist (or existed) on multiple servers across the campus.  Rob can make more
sense of this for you but my impression was that it was a big headache for all
involved.  Dick King, University of Arizona.
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