More SLA NWRC session notes (October 6th sessions)
Xpediant’s Farida Hasanali presented “Implementing a Content Management System: Do Your Homework!”. The most important message I drew from this session was to avoid using technology for technology’s sake. Hasanali discussed explicit knowledge versus tacit knowledge, and how they fit into CM and KM systems. Explicit knowledge is easy to replicate and share and contributes to efficiency. On the other hand, tacit knowledge is hard to articulate and hard to steal, leads to competency, and provides a strong competitive advantage.
KM=tacit knowledge, concerned with the message
CM=explicit knowledge, concerned with the medium
That said, CM deals with the output of KM, and encompasses people, processes, technology and the content itself.
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Susan Tyrrell, an enterprise content management specialist from Calgary, presented “If You Don’t Do It, Someone Else Will: Why Librarians Should Become Content Managers”. Her talk was quite general in nature and not specific to web, but worthwhile nevertheless. Tyrrell submits that libraries and CMS are similar in a lot of ways: content is tagged (catalogued), classification schemes and taxonomies are used, including controlled vocabularies, and generally they are self-serve systems, although they are developed and maintained by experts. CMS present additional challenges, though: there are so many places where technology can fail or go wrong, there are compatibility and integration issues, and the human aspect: it takes time, training, and effort to participate in a CMS. Evangelism is a critical part of a successful CMS. This involves marketing, tying in ECM with other systems and projects, identifying and mentoring champions, and listening carefully for ideas for improvements and then actually acting on them. According to Tyrrell, traditional library skills are a natural fit for CM projects, since we already have experience with taxonomy, metadata, search, and reference interview skills, which come in handy during the selection, design, and support of a CMS. We also experienced in training and orientation techniques, and know a thing or two about marketing.
That’s not to say that we are perfectly suited to CM projects: there are many areas where we can improve (skill gap). Project management — as a formal process (scheduling, scope definition, and change management) — is often foreign to us. We also need to become comfortable with IT infrastructure and jargon, so we can speak the same language as the techies. Tyrrell asserts that ECM projects often fail because they are lead by IT people, who generally favour products that look slick and are full of “features”, rather than selecting a product based on what the business requires. And ironically, the IT people rarely the ones using the CM, so it is difficult for them to understand user frustrations.
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Incidentally, I was talking to Susan before the keynote and it turns out she used to teach Records Management at SAIT. I told her what a rigmorole the class had been in the years leading up to, and to some extent the year we took the course, and she cringed, remembering that it had been somewhat stressful to teach the course. I guess being a sessional instructor can be quite gruelling! It made me hope that the year ahead of us wasn’t too hard on theirs.
Speaking of SAIT, at the conference I ran into my old cataloguing teacher, Darlene Taylor! And speaking of gruelling, I know for certain that cataloguing must be a very challenging class to teach – to teach well, anyway, as she did. Darlene has the patience of a saint! One of the neatest things about going to conferences is running into your old teachers. They seem calm and caring as ever, but somehow much more human, and they marvel at how you’ve grown out of “student mode” — it’s a good feeling.