Content Management Systems Digital Resources for Research in the Humanities 2001

Roadmap Content Manipulation: Scripting Weeks 1-4 Content Servers & Databases Weeks 1-4 Information Retrieval Week 5 Content Representation Systems Weeks 6-7,9 Field Research Systems (incl QDAS) Week 8-11 Audience Analysis Week 12 Intellectual Property & Rights Management

What every web publisher is looking for? A system for managing digital content, resources and rights.

The Content Management Challenge Building interactive content stores for information delivery Managing multimedia content Moderating feedback & participation Maintaining design standards Repurposing & syndicating content Indexing, searching and navigation Publishing is not a technical speciality Multi-language publishing

CMS Characteristics Content separated from presentation –users are or can be insulated from the specific delivery coding (just as Word insulates the use from the internal markup) –Site or Corporate design constraints are honoured Editorial Control Users are separated from the mechanics of publishing Managing inbound and outbound content Storing, or at least organising multimedia content Dynamic content serving Rights management

Inbound content Moderation Take feedback, survey, commentary, review and other content submitted by external users Provide a mechanism for authorising/approving the content

Moderation Used in BBS, Forum and Website architectures to provide controlled discussions, feedback and input Eg Montage:School submissions arrive in XML for moderation in the publishing system Submissions can be republished or used in “Mail Merge” style outs (eg E-Zine). Applications: Surveys, Reviews, Feedback, User contributions, Competitions, Subscriptions, etc

Repurposing & syndicating content News feeds and other information can be syndicated based on whatever selection rules apply Syndicated content can be delivered anywhere required via HTTP,XML, , FTP Building content in multiple forms: –Eg HTML information pages, broadbande magazines

Indexing, searching and navigation The key to building structured self- maintaining and current websites Search engines alone have limited value, navigation aids are also important Indexing facilities can give structured subject and navigational guides based on content information The intellectual effort of classification ultimately pays off in large and complex sites

Intelligent Agents Using the underlying data store to generate related subject areas, similar topics and associated articles Generating meta information to improve search engine discovery Generating meta information for advanced integration with search engines

Objective of a CMS Build a long-term multimedia content store of all relevant images, text and multimedia material Give end-user control over publishing Maintain site Editorial standards Combat issues of obsolescence in representational technology

Applications in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities In Art History –Photographic image databases –Feeding into online websites and virtual exhibitions In Literature analysis and criticism –Full text databases –Re-generating and re-circulating out of print items –The opportunity to encapsulate the “complete” corpus of knowledge in a given “closed” literary segment (eg Greek & Roman Classics)

Multi-lingual issues Can the software be used in an international multi-office setting ? Multi-lingual site design raises issues of country-specific graphical design The UI might need to be country configurable

Rights management Every object in the database should have the capability to report on rights associated with the object Usage reporting on rights – a major challenge in existing web architectures

Looking for word processing features WYSIWYG editing Spell checking Customised forms Easy navigation, searching, publishing

A Conceptual framework Document Language Instance Presentation Instance VideoAudioImageText Print HTML/XML 1,* 0,*

CMS Tour

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