Drupal at Emory University

On June 2nd I had the pleasure of catching up with Scott Turnbull, an old coworker of mine from Emory University’s library system. We once shared an oversized windowless office in the lower level of the Health Sciences Library in 1998 as we attempted to resurrect a medical website consisting of 17,000-plus links to useful medical sites around the world, arranged by subject.

I left Emory at the end of that year, and we kept in touch sporadically over the ensuing years. My email to Scott earlier in the week querying him about the use of CMS at the libraries elicited this response: “We just switched over our sites to use Drupal as a CMS and we're currently running 15 or so Drupal Sites. We're also running a handful of Wordpress Sites and Open Journal System (OJS) sites.” Perfect.

Scott’s title is now Manager of Information Technologies for the libraries, although internally he is still known as Manager of Software Engineering. When asked where he learned of CMS, he said “I’ve known of it for years. Drupal in particular has a lot of traction in the library world and has had for a long time; it usually comes out on top when people are talking about CMS for libraries. Joomla also comes up a lot. We created a test site back in June of last year as a trial, and we liked it. The conversion sites came online in January of this year.”

What led them to make the change? “That’s easy” he says. “Workflow. It gave us a greater ability to control architecture. It also offered built-in support for RSS feeds , news, etc.”

As for the criteria used for picking a CMS, Scott says “Architecture was our main concern as well as scalability. It was also important for us to consider how much time it would take for us to learn it, how long to update IT, plus how much effort we had to expend to sustain it. We were also looking for a CMS that fit in with our core proficiencies. We’re most proficient with PHP. So, we did some reviews of what’s out there and decided on Drupal. Its wide adoption in libraries was a plus, as was the large community of Drupal developers. Finally, we thought that the work flow worked really well. That sealed it.”

Why change from the old web sites? Were there issues that they could resolve by moving to CMS? “Definitely. Previously, campus-wide we used a template that produced XML files. The template-based system was not at all clear to library staff. As a result they were very reluctant to update their areas. In addition, the old system lacked a lot of features like RSS, feedback forms, and search. Drupal lets them edit directly, it has a blog feature and user management features that we like. The architecture is very easy, and easy to maintain. What’s not to like?”

What about the learning curve? For the first time, Scott pauses and chooses his words very carefully. “The learning curve was not so bad, but it was worse than I expected it to be. Most of the staff had very little technical experience to prepare them for this. We did extensive training of several hours per week over three or four months. First we trained the trainers and then the trainers went out and did their training. One thing about training: it’s nice, but you need to make sure people start using what they’re learning immediately or they’ll forget it.”

Would they consider going back to the old system? “Nope”, he says. “We’re happy. Any future implementations will be Drupal. It meets all of our needs, and when the time comes that it doesn’t we’ll build on to it. And you can’t argue with the price.”

That’s something we can all relate to.