Small college CMS

The article "Building a collection development CMS on a shoe-string" by Regina Beach and Miqueas Dial (Library Hi Tech, 2006, vol. 24, issue 1) highlights the efforts made by the small campus of Texas A&M University-Kingsville to digitize their book ordering process.

Before this project, faculty at this small college of 5000 students continued to rely on physical order form cards to request acquisitions from library staff. The process was slow, unreliable, and difficult to track. Often books were ordered, but no follow-up was forthcoming to inform faculty of their arrival. Additionally, library holdings were considered insufficient to promote scholarly competitiveness, and professors frequently found themselves "teaching down to the library resources".

In partial remedy of this situation, the library instituted a small CMS designed to streamline the book ordering process. Created using Microsoft Access, the new database provides faculty with a one-stop platform to submit and track orders. A secondary goal, through collaboration with the acquisitions and cataloging staff, is to consolidate information by allowing bibliographic data to be entered into the library system only once (instead of multiple times across platforms).

I chose this article for two reasons. First, I was curious to see what CMS solution a small college (with limited staff and resources) would implement. Secondly, because it's quite likely my first position post-graduation will be with a smaller institution, I was interested in learning how they approach such issues. Quite frankly, I was expecting an open-source solution, and was a little surprised to find they used Access. Most likely they already had it on their systems, and didn't expend resources to acquire it solely for this purpose. I was also surprised by the limited scope of the project. I often imagine CMS' being very large and comprehensive, but this project addressed such a modest issue that the term "CMS" almost seemed too broad in relation to the problem being solved.