Website and Newsletter Recommendations

College and University Archives Section: Website and Newsletter Discussion Document/Recommendations

August 2010

A subgroup of the Steering Committee (Maria Estorino, Jay Gaidmore, and Chris Prom) reviewed the CU Section website and newsletter.  We solicited feedback from Website Editor Claude Zachary, Newsletter Editor Chris Laico, and other members of the Steering Committee.  We make the following recommendations, and would like to consider any additional ideas that section members might provided at the section meeting or via comment to members of the Steering Committee.

Section Website 

•    Our existing content can be managed very easily in SAA’s new Drupal system.  Most of the content has already been migrated.  Any additional content should be migrated over the next several months.

•    SAA has configured Drupal for three permission levels/roles.  Our website editor, Chair and Vice-Chair should be given the highest level of control, the "Group Editor” role.  All other members of steering committee and newsletter editor should be given "Group Officer" role, which will allow them to edit the group description and group pages, as well as the newsletter.  The Newsletter editor should be provided the “Group Contributor” permission level, which provides access to edit Newsletter pages.  Upon request, additional section members could be provided the Group Officer or Group Contributor designation.

•    Drupal has a separate module for posting meeting minutes.  We should use this mechanism, rather than the newsletter, to publish meeting minutes.

•    We should organize content better, since there are opportunities to enhance our web presence so that the Section site not only serves the needs of our group but also functions as a resource for the larger C&U community. The sites for other SAA sections and roundtables provide examples of some basic things we can do to develop our website. Some examples: a Governance section that would bring together the Section by-laws, steering committee manual, annual reports, committees/task forces, and related info; a Resources section that links to the Guidelines for C&U A, the Thesaurus for use in C&U A, books in the SAA bookstore on C&UA, etc.  We could have an Annual Meeting section that gives info about the Section meeting and sessions of interest to C&U A.

•    We may also wish to develop a CU Section blog, following the model of the LACCHA Roundtable blog, where that group attempted to create a space online for discussion of Roundtable matters: http://laccha.blogspot.com/.  The Drupal features could potentially allow the section to develop a collaborative work spaces, if we want to use it that way, but it may be difficult to configure given the current permission/role settings that SAA has configured.

Newsletter.  Regarding the newsletter, Drupal provides an easy way to post the newsletter in HTML instead of PDF.  It is very easy to use and allows the editor to insert images, linked files, etc.  We should eventually transition to this format.  In order to facilitate this change, Chris Laico has generously offered to continue as a year for editor, publishing the newsletter in PDF during this time.  We therefore recommend that the section accept this offer and recruit a new editor, who would begin work in the summer/fall of 2011. The new editor newsletter should review the format, which currently consists mainly of long-form articles.  For example, we might include a section for short, one paragraph announcements, changes of job, etc.