Interesting article

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

The Management of Content: Universities and the Electronic Publishing
Revolution

by Philip Hunter
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/cms/
Ariadne Issue 28 June 2001

"Just three or four years ago the Web community was getting used to the
idea that the way we would work in future would be radically different
from the way we work now. The world of coalface flatfile html markup would
begin to disappear in favour of collaborative working, managed workflow,
document versioning, on the fly pages constructed out of application
independent xml chunks, site management tools and push-button publishing
via multiple formats - html, xml, pdf, print, etc. Text appearing in more
than one context would be stored in a central repository and repurposed
according to particular requirements. In the UK Higher Education sector,
this doesn't seem to have happened. Worldwide in the university sector, it
doesn't seem to have happened. Site management tools are being used here
and there, and there are now decent text editors both available and widely
used - this means that Web Editors are no longer expected to deal with
basic markup chores all day every day. Some sites put together pages on
the fly, using SSIs or ASP chunks. There are sites which interface with
backend databases to provide user requested data in a user friendly
format. However you will have to look hard for a Higher Education sector
site which uses all of these techniques and which yokes them together with
collaborative working and managed workflow. Higher Education is not using
content management systems as a matter of course, and is not making use of
the most sophisticated systems available."

The article doesn't describe such systems, but looks back at the history
of Universities and publishing. The first two paragraphs quoted above may
be the most provocative part of the article.I'm not aware of content
management systems being implemented at Universities in the US either--If
liblicense readers know, of them, I'd like you to let me know what they
are, where they are being used, and who is responsible for them.

Thanks
Chuck