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Online Course Catalogs



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