Content in Motion: What iTunes Can Teach Us About Managing Web Content

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Content in Motion: What iTunes Can Teach Us About Managing Web Content

3/29/2005

By Piet Niederhausen

First, as always, many of our challenges are organizational, not technical. Colleges and universities are decentralized. Our content lives in silos, and cutting across those silos to assemble related content for the end user is a challenge. As we've done with other projects in the past, we'll have to prioritize areas where we can gain the most, starting with the key content most important to our individual institutions, and show stakeholders in those areas that change will benefit everyone.

The most fundamental change we'll be asking our colleagues to make is to stop thinking in terms of publishing specific Web pages, and start thinking in terms of creating self-sufficient content objects that will work well in many contexts. For example, someone who previously wrote a news story specifically to appear on one Web page now needs to write it so that the title, teaser, and body will work whether the story appears on the institution home page, in the student portal, on a department Web site, on a cell phone, or in an archive two years later. And the story needs to be flagged with appropriate metadata so that it will flow into all the news topics, academic disciplines, portal channels, faculty profiles, and RSS feeds where it belongs.

Second, we should be looking for and, if necessary, developing content management tools that are designed to put content in motion. The easiest way to get content on the Web is still to make a Web page, but doing that produces none of the long-term benefits we want. Web content management systems hold great promise, but many are designed or implemented simply to streamline the process of creating Web pages, not to manage content for long term re-use.

Here also, we'll have to prioritize, start small, and work our way up to tools that can manage lots of diverse content seamlessly. At my institution, Georgetown University, I try to treat every new Web application as a chance to advance an overall strategy to make key institutional content more portable. Years ago I had the opportunity to create a Web database application for events. When the opportunity to work on faculty profiles arose, the connection to events wasn't obvious. But when we were subsequently asked to manage syllabi online, and then course descriptions, university news, and other content followed, a strategy emerged. We've connected these areas with common metadata, related database structures, and shared tools for syndicating content in multiple ways. Our work is far from complete, we're still discovering what we can do, and it certainly d'esn't work as smoothly as iTunes--yet. But I'm confident that one of the most important things we can be doing is to challenge ourselves and our colleagues to think about content in new, more flexible ways.

Terry’s endnote: Yep, he put his finger on it. "The most fundamental change we’ll be asking our colleagues to make is to stop thinking in terms of publishing specific Web pages, and start thinking in terms of creating self-sufficient content objects that will work in many contexts." There are times when I doubt this is possible; times when I have a great deal of wrapping my own mind around the concept. I 'get it' but I find it hard to do. When I think of the need to ‘educate’ all of our content providers, it’s easy to be a little pessimistic.

Niederhausen is University Webmaster at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Cite this Site

Piet Niederhausen, "Content in Motion: What iTunes Can Teach Us About Managing Web Content," Campus Technology, 3/29/2005, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=40157

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