Contributed by Organizations or Campuses and Web Administration, Design, and Development

"Drupal in Libraries" features helpful case history examples of Drupal use in libraries. Most of the report, however, is dedicated to a useful and user-friendly how-to guide for libraries interested in utilizing Drupal — and its dedicated developer community — to build dynamic and easy-to-use library Web sites.

Institutions of higher education are increasingly turning to web 2.0 technologies such as facebook, blogging, podcasting and photo sharing sites to market their schools to the net generation.

The Fluid Project is an international community of academic institutions, community source software projects and corporations working together to address the precarious values of usability, accessibility, internationalization, quality assurance and security within academic software projects.

Fluid combines both design and technology to create a living library of sharable user interface components that can be reused across community source projects. These components are built specifically to support flexibility and customization while maintaining a high standard of design quality. The Fluid framework will enable designers and developers to build user interfaces that can more readily accommodate the diverse personal and institutional needs found within community source projects.

Fluid will encourage user-centered design practices within community source software. To this end, we are creating a designer's toolkit that will offer useful design, accessibility, and usability strategies and documentation. Members of the Fluid team are available to provide usability and accessibility support within the Sakai, uPortal, Kuali Student, and Moodle communities.

Fifty-three percent of the IT executives surveyed last summer by Jupiter Media Metrix said that they would implement a digital document management system by the end of 2002 (Kemp, 2002; Oettinger, 2002; Walker, 2002). This is not surprising in light of a 2002 Gartner CIO survey that found that content management was second only to security as a spending priority (Gilbert & Logan, 2002). However, Jupiter also indicated that many businesses will pay too much for Web content management systems and many would be better served by homegrown or low-cost solutions. One would expect this to be particularly true for colleges and universities facing severe budget cuts (Goral, 2002). Yet, there is no doubt that Web content management is important. In 2000, Syllabus magazine reported that one of the top three reasons a student selects a particular college is that school's Web site (Long). Notably, college students as a group are among the most experienced Web users. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project (2002), 86 percent of college students have gone online in contrast to 59 percent of the general population.

Pace University New York City campus is located in the heart of Lower Manhattan, the civic and financial center of the city. The University initiated efforts, in the aftermath of 9/11, to further expand its commitment to community service and pursue opportunities to engage students and faculty in collaborative civic projects. The faculty in the School of Computer Science and Information Systems (CSIS) identified the need of local non-profit agencies to create Web sites that fully articulate their programs and services. Such agencies generally have limited financial resources for technology applications and welcome the opportunity to benefit from student interest and enthusiasm in applying their knowledge to real-world challenges.

The costs associated with paper were becoming a concern for Winona State University. Instead of printing and submitting paper copies of assignments, I engaged in an experiment requiring students to submit finished work to their personal class Web site. The success of the experiment led to continued experimentation with this methodology. Feedback from other professors encouraged the use of other technologies, such as Web forms and scripting.