Greetings: Our university is moving to an online-only course catalog beginning with
the Fall 2002 semester. The plan
we are discussing is based upon our current online catalog, which is divided in
two: a) the curricular/program pages that describe the requirements for the
various degrees offered (which are HTML pages); and b) the individual courses
and their descriptions offered by each department (which are maintained on a home-grown
database). As I understand it, this
current database is being switched to a much bigger PeopleSoft database that
will (eventually) contain all courses and their descriptions offered since the
university’s inception in 1958. Since,
like all university archives, we get many requests from former students for the
old course descriptions, I want to ensure that students have access to the all
the information they used to get in the print. I don’t see any problem with delivering the information this
way, provided it actually works. I’m interested if other academic archivists have any experience with archiving
course descriptions on a database.
The online catalogs I have looked at are usually in PDF or HTML format
and have the course descriptions listed therein, both of which pose no
archiving problem. We may go that
route, but I wonder if this other alternative has been tried at other
institutions and how archivists have dealt with it. This list’s archives don’t have much on this aspect of the
topic. I promise to summarize the
responses I get (if any) to the entire list. Thanks for your help. John C. Kelly Digital Initiatives Librarian Earl K. Long Library University of New Orleans |