Case Study:
At Purdue, Acalog Project Led to
Deeper Understanding of Institutional
Processes, and an Opportunity to
Create Consistency
How a Big 10 school built
its first online catalog, then
discovered it had created
built-in accountability among
campus stakeholders.
• Prior to implementation of the Acalog e-catalog system,
academic offerings at Purdue were listed in multiple online
locations and sometimes included outdated information that was
inconsistently formatted and difficult to find.
• The process of implementing its new academic catalog
management system required the office of the registrar to reexamine processes and workflows and establish accountabilities
that facilitated publication of a student-friendly resource that was
easy to manage.
AT A GLANCE
Client:
Purdue University
West Lafayette, Indiana
Enrollment: 40,451 FTE
Digarc Software:
Acalog, Curriculog
• Once in place, the school’s new e-catalog system delivered
multiple benefits to students and administrators due to its
powerful relational database architecture and many robust
features. It also fostered a thorough understanding of how
courses and programs are structured institution-wide.
The Office of the Registrar at Purdue University knew it was time for a robust online catalog solution. So in
late 2015, it evaluated several systems, and then decided on the Acalog academic catalog management
system by Digarc. At the same time, the Big 10 school purchased Digarc’s curriculum management
platform, Curriculog. It’s a decision that Associate Registrar Josie Galloway now considers important to
the success of the digital transformation of public-facing academic information on courses and programs.
CREATING
ACCOUNTABILITY
“(Acalog) is very easy
to navigate, very easy
to change. It’s forced
(catalog stakeholders)
to take a look at their
own data and to own it
a bit more.”
— Josie Galloway
Before the decision was made to implement Acalog at
Purdue, course and program offerings were not available
from any one location. Students looking for course
information had to search through department listings,
which weren’t presented in a consistent format, and
sometimes included outdated or incomplete descriptions
and class details.
According to Josie, the Acalog implementation forced
Purdue to examine institutional processes, policies and
procedures that were long in place, but rarely revisited. “It
was much more than just publishing a catalog,” she says.
“It was definitely data validation, re-engineering processes,
and restructuring some tables. There was a lot of that.”
Josie, who led the implementation project for Purdue, worked with
Digarc’s implementation team to bring the new e-catalog to life in
spring 2016. Seven members of the Digarc Professional Services Team1
partnered with the Purdue implementation team2 as work got underway to
build the school’s new centralized e-catalog system.
DATA VALIDATION,
RE-ENGINEERED
PROCESSES
“Implementing Acalog enabled
us to pull together policies,
procedures, and plans of
studies all into one place.
It allowed us to eliminate
redundancy on departmental
websites that may not be
valid. That’s definitely one
component that I think is very
attractive about Acalog.
“But it’s also afforded us the
opportunity to re-examine all
of our processes, and our validation and data that’s in the
systems and say, ‘OK, what’s
going on?’ So as a by-product,
it caused us to really reengineer our processes so things
align.
“It was much more than just
publishing a catalog. It was
definitely data validation,
re-engineering processes,
restructuring some tables.
There was a lot of that.”
— Josie Galloway
Purdue’s new catalog was built “very much from the ground-up,” says
Josie. “We started by looking at what should go in it — what it should look
like.”
As can be seen now on Purdue’s catalog online [http://catalog.purdue.
edu/], the Acalog Gateway seamlessly integrates with schools’ websites
and offers the ability to include rich media such as videos along with
academic content. Because the mobile interface of Acalog is built on
HTML5, the e-catalog automatically optimizes for mobile platforms,
increasingly favored by students and faculty alike.
For prospective students, social network integration is also built into
Acalog. Links for Facebook and Twitter allow students to keep family and
friends abreast of the status of their college search.
“At the end of the day, we got a great product,” says Josie. “We never
had done an online catalog before, so we had a lot of questions.”
Fortunately, the Digarc implementation team had done online catalogs
before — about 450 of them since 2001. And they had answers for Josie
and her team.
As Josie explains it, the implementation of Acalog facilitated — for the
first time — a thorough understanding of how course and program
information was organized institution-wide: “Looking at it at the beginning,
we didn’t know that would happen.”
1 The Digarc Implementation Team included one consultant, one associate consultant, a project
coordinator, a trainer, and three transition specialists.
2 Jerry Ross, Registrar; Josie Galloway, Associate Registrar; Sandra Schaffer, Senior Assistant Registrar;
Nikki Zimmerman, Catalog Manager; Sarena Messersmith; Jamie Mohler, Associate Dean of the Graduate School/Grad Project Sponsor; Tina Payne, Graduate Programs Manager/Grad Functional Lead; Don
Brier, Information Management & Assessment Director/Grad Functional Team Member; Brittany, Graduate
School Secretary/Grad Functional Team Member.
IMMEDIATE BENEFITS
For the Purdue team, Acalog delivered features and functionality not previously seen at the
West Lafayette campus. At the top of the list, according to Purdue’s Tina Payne: The ability to
have all academic information in one place, followed by Acalog’s advanced search feature,
and the software’s ability to include a complete policy manual as an easily edited web page.
For students, she rates Acalog’s search functionality, print options and consistency of
information presented as the chief benefits.
“Information about the department, programs and majors are easy to find and search within,”
says Tina. “(Acalog) provides end users with the ability to print plans of study and easy search
for active and admitting majors at Purdue University.”
Acalog includes a feature called Print Degree Planner, which, when enabled, allows students
to easily produce a list of courses with checkboxes that can be used as part of the academic
advising process. The planner is automatically generated and always reflects any changes
made to a program.
BUDGET IMPACT
Typically, institutions switching to Acalog from paper- or PDF-based catalogs
immediately see a substantial savings in staff hours required to build, revise and
manage their academic catalogs. That savings in staff time, of course, translates
directly to budget dollars, which are in ever-greater demand in the current
environment.
In the case of Purdue, however, it’s difficult to gauge this, “since Purdue was not
providing a catalog when we started this project,” says Tina, the school’s Graduate
Programs Manager and member of the implementation team.
Perhaps the more tangible measure of cost and staff time savings at Purdue will
come from the rigorous review and refinement of processes related to communicating
academic offerings. With Acalog, Purdue was able to thin out inefficient workflows,
restructure course and program data into a relational database, and create
accountability among those responsible for providing content for the catalog.
Purdue also plans to implement Acalog’s sister solution, the Curriculog curriculum
management system. Integration between the Digarc catalog and curriculum solutions
was a big selling point for Purdue, says Josie. “Having two systems that could work as
a married system was a big component for us. We really wanted a one-stop shop.”
SOLUTION
SYNERGIES
“I would tell other schools
that if you’re going to
purchase it, don’t just
purchase one (solution).
Make sure you’re
understanding what
you’re buying and how
purchasing the other will
marry the two together.”
— Josie Galloway
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