[Web4lib] ALA Poster Session Announcement: Citizens of Drupal

[DeVane, Annie]

Did you take our Drupal Survey? Come by the ALA Poster Session to view the results!

Sunday- June 26, 2011: 3:00pm-4:30pm
Convention Center Booth 2556
Session VI – 8/Infrastructure:  Posters on Buildings and Equipment, Management, and Technology

Citizens of Drupal: Staffing and Sustainability in the Open Source Environment

Amanda Rust, Northeastern University, Boston, MA (a.rust at neu.edu<mailto:a.rust at neu.edu>)
Annie DeVane, Northeastern University, Boston, MA (a.devane at neu.edu<mailto:a.devane at neu.edu>)
Gayane K. Merguerian, Northeastern University, Boston, MA (g.merguerian at neu.edu<mailto:g.merguerian at neu.edu>)
Diann Smothers, Northeastern University, Boston, MA (d.smothers at neu.edu<mailto:d.smothers at neu.edu>)

Northeastern University’s Snell Library used a major Web site redesign as an opportunity to move to the Drupal CMS platform. Our planning process required us to estimate the staff needed to support a large, customized Drupal Web site. To either challenge or back up our estimate, we created a survey and distributed it via the Web4Lib, Code4Lib, and Drupal4Lib email lists. The aim of the survey was to determine what sort of staffing would be necessary for a large, heavily-customized Drupal Web site, and the results informed an internal staffing proposal. The survey results also give a brief overview of the current citizens of the Drupal library community, and the poster presents the results in graphical form. We received many requests for the results from participants, which speaks to a growing interest in Drupal as a CMS for library Web sites, and to library concerns about appropriate staffing. The poster will also evaluate the results in light of our actual experience building our new site in Drupal, and put the process of choosing a CMS into the larger context of our library Web redesign project. We invite our colleagues at ALA to stop by to discover and to discuss what we learned.

Annie DeVane
Accounts Assistant
Member of Web Steering Committee and Web Redesign Team
Northeastern University Libraries
a.devane at neu.edu
phone 617.373.7757
fax 617.373.8396
------------------------
260 Snell Library
360 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115