Interview with Kara Reuter

For this assignment, I interviewed Kara Reuter, Digital Library Manager of Worthington Libraries in Worthington, OH. The interview took place via email on June 02, 2010.

How and where did your library first hear about Content Management Systems?

I can’t say that I can recall when I first heard about content management systems in general, but they weren’t a new concept to me or to Worthington Libraries when I started here in 2007. However, the first time I heard about Drupal in particular was in the summer of 2007 at a local conference when presenters from the Cleveland Public Library talked about their implementation of Drupal for their website.

What made your library decide to use Drupal for your library's website? What was the decision making criteria?

We didn’t have a budget for a CMS, so only looked at open source options and, even then, the only other product we looked at seriously was Joomla. Our feeling was that Drupal was mature, highly extensible and had an excellent user community, especially among libraries. We had actually heard lots of good buzz about Drupal in the library community beyond Cleveland Public Library. As you probably know, there’s the Libraries group at drupal.org:(http://groups.drupal.org/libraries) and the DRUPAL4LIB email list (http://listserv.uic.edu/archives/drupal4lib.html). We’re also lucky that there’s been a nice user community growing up here in Columbus (http://groups.drupal.org/central-ohio) that we’ve been able to participate with. So, I guess you’d say our criteria were (1) cost and (2) community.

What are the important benefits or advantages of Drupal over the old system or another Content Management System your library used in the past?

Our old site was built in 2001, using ColdFusion with a Flash interface. By the time I arrived in 2007, the website was in desperate need of a makeover. At that point, all updates to the site required hand coding and it had become very difficult to add on to.

In contrast, Drupal makes it possible to create a dynamic website with very little direct intervention. So, our news items can be authored by different staff members and scheduled to publish in advance. Once they publish, they appear automatically on our homepage (in the right sidebar); they’re published in an RSS feed; they’re automatically grouped by topic using tags and taxonomy terms; and they’re sorted in to an archive based on date (http://www.worthingtonlibraries.org/about/news)—all using standard Drupal tools and modules.

In a similar fashion, the “Today at the Library” block in the left sidebar of the homepage is automatically populated each day with the day’s events from our Calendar. As the day goes on, the events disappear so that only upcoming events are displayed. Once the events are added to our calendar, we’ve set it up so that all of this happens automatically. (For the record, this functionality is a little bit less standard and actually relies on a module we developed in-house that we’re in the process of releasing for download on drupal.org.)

How was the learning curve for using the new site? Were there any special skills needed to develop the site?

I like to joke that Drupal has more of a learning cliff than a learning curve! In fact, Drupal does seem to have the reputation for having a pretty steep learning curve—see what Dries Buytaert (the original creator of Drupal) has to say about it: http://buytaert.net/drupal-learning-curve

I think it’s probably possible to set up a Drupal site without any special skills in Web design or development, but it would be pretty generic. We didn’t want our website to look like a blog and we especially wanted a strong identity for the library, so we put some serious effort in to developing a custom theme for our site, which requires deep understanding of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and some basic understanding of PHP. More sophisticated PHP skill is essential to do all the things necessary for a library website, such as integrate with the ILS, provide remote access to subscription databases, offer email and chat reference and incorporate all the social media “stuff,” like podcasting, vlogging, etc.

How did your patrons react to the new site?

We got some positive feedback when we initially launched our website back in November 2008. In conjunction with the decision to migrate to Drupal, we undertook a major redesign process that gathered extensive feedback from our community and staff, which you can read a little bit about here. I think the user-centered redesign process we used has had a greater impact on the the user experience of our site than Drupal per se, but as a platform Drupal makes it pretty easy for us to rapidly develop new features, such as our mobile website.

Have you had any problems/issues with using Drupal?

I mentioned that we chose Drupal partly because of its extensibility, but this has turned out to be a blessing and a curse. Sometimes it can be a challenge to find the right module—or the right combination of modules!—to accomplish a particular task. Also, there is almost always more than one way to solve a problem in Drupal. It can be hard to know which is the best solution, especially when you’re low on that “learning cliff.” As a result, our development process in Drupal is usually iterative—trying lots of things until we hit upon the solution that feels right.

Apart from the technology itself, there are some challenging workflow issues that come with a CMS. So: Who define the scope of the site? Who is responsible for generating the content? Who has permissions to publish content? Who ensures quality control? Who sets, monitors and enforces deadlines? Although several members of staff contribute content to our website, only technology staff are currently actually updating and publishing content to the site. Although Drupal has wonderful tools to facilitate distributed authorship, we have not yet opened up our website to staff in large part because we need to work through the workflow and training issues.