Creating a taxonomy for university websites

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ullafayette's picture

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette is currently redeveloping our main website in Drupal. We will be moving the rest of the university to Drupal using templates as we go forward.

Our site is over a decade old, so this has been an arduous process and evolution.

We are currently developing a taxonomy for our main site (which includes academics, admissions, campus life, research, etc) that we are hoping will apply to our subsites (colleges, departments, programs, etc.). At this point it is a rather daunting process and can clearly get out of hand if we aren't careful.

What are some of the best practices you've come across for higher education/university taxonomies? Does anyone have recommendations or approaches they feel worked well?

We're kind of feeling our way in the dark right now, so any information is greatly appreciated!

Comments

LIS or libraries

tovstiadi's picture

Hi RaginCajun -

Do you have any librarians / library & information science folks on your team? Librarians have dealt with metadata (=taxonomy) longer than any of us - for centuries really. They won't be able to help you with the technical / Drupal side of things, but they will be great in helping with the architecture (controlled vocabularies vs. open tagging, classification, etc)

I think ideally a university should have a metadata policy / best practice document just like we do on graphics, accessibility, and typography

Let me know if you need me to elaborate on any of this

Kosta
University of Colorado Boulder

Thanks so much for the

ullafayette's picture

Thanks so much for the response, Kosta! We've actually discussed contacting the librarians to discuss how best to set up the taxonomy.

Based on your suggestion, I've sent an email out to see if anyone at our library will be able to meet and advise us on how best to move forward.

Are there any best practices or insights you've encountered at Colorado?

Aimee,
UL Lafayette

practices

tovstiadi's picture

Aimee -

The taxonomy functionality in Drupal is so flexible and versatile and can be used in so many different ways that it is hard to give general advice.

It can be used for open tagging, for controlled vocabularies, for menus, for serving related content and building list of content (using Views) and for a ton of other things - so it really depends on what you are trying to achieve.

On our sites here taxonomy is only used internally (i.e. tags are never exposed to users but used by admins as a sorting device). That was a choice - good or bad, but it was made. Most universities are really afraid of any open content - whether it is web forms, or ratings, or comments, or open tags because they are afraid of spam and inappropriate content.

K

Thanks, Kosta. We're planning

ullafayette's picture

Thanks, Kosta. We're planning on using ours internally as well for the same fears you all have. I've noticed some discussion in the Drupal groups about whether to use the names of colleges and departments in the taxonomy. I was just wondering if general practices like that were used by universities.

I'd also look at what you are

btopro's picture

I'd also look at what you are considering Taxonomies and see if making them a content type wouldn't make more sense. I recently setup an online course listing for our college and found that in classifying Courses, "Program" and "academic unit" both made more sense to have as content types which a course could reference.

While you can add fields to taxonomy types, I prefer to treat fielded taxonomies as their own content types. This is especially helpful of a practice to stick to if you use node-based content access control modules (like nodeaccess_nodereference, OG, or Content Access). If you are trying to use taxonomy access for your system structure then I'd recommend having fields on the terms and less content types.

Yes, CTs and Content Strategy first

zchandler's picture

As usual I find myself agreeing with BTO :)

Carefully think through the content types of your site first, but I also encourage you to give careful consideration to a comprehensive Content Strategy at this point: a plan for the creation, curation, and governance of all the content on your website. This forces us to think of the admin user as we build, instead of reacting to their needs after the build is over.

The biggest question to answer up front is: How many sites will there be? Is each academic department a website? Should we use multi-site? Is there one website, and separate units either use OG, Domain Access, or other technique for creating separation for depts and programs? The answer will depend on the particular needs of your institution.

Here is a great presentation by crell on figuring out which approach to use:
http://munich2012.drupal.org/program/sessions/multi-headed-drupal

Lastly, YES, you should also be using Taxonomy. It is an incredibly important part of the Content Model. But get all your content types sorted out first.

Also look at various distros for ideas:
Nittany
Open Academy
Julio
OpenEDU (technically not a distro)

And apply this question to each: what use case is this distro trying to solve for?