I’m a little late on posting this, but the catalog has been launched. There’s no major new online features here, really just a laborious transcription of the paper catalog into HTML, and our standard reimagining of some parts.

It’s interesting — when I first got here we were recoding every catalog from scratch, and it was a process that took a month of effort and was fraught with error. The second year I was here we introduced a “diff-doc” process, which drastically cut production time for the policies and programs sections, and last year we moved the courses out of the db, and into flat pages, because the idiosyncracies of courses being called multiple things and appearing under multiple courses was getting a tad baroque — people thought not in terms of the course database when designing the catalog, but in terms of the paper catalog. So we drop the pretense of that there was some underlying generative structure for this thing, and just went to straight HTML pages — and people loved it.

So now that we have this process *down*, what happens? Well, next year’s catalog will be an online only version — and that’s going to take some serious reworking of the production process.

It’s a classic example of how things work over here — no project or process online is ever really “done” — it’s only awaiting it’s next iteration…