Documentation Project: Academic software resources

ABSTRACT

Over a period of years, an academic user services group can go through enough personnel changes to cause a loss in continuity in documentation. As a result, hundreds of inadequately documented resources can accumulate, become obsolete, or come to exist in multiple copies and versions. User Services may find themselves having to rely on individual users or former staff to supply information on the more obscure resources. Their task, therefore, becomes the creation of a data bank of information documenting all of the functional academic resources on the system. We are now in our second year of such a Documentation Project. We are pleased with the progress and hope that it will provide the foundation for a lasting system. Throughout, we have attempted to make the system easy to maintain and flexible to future expansion. Our considerations during the project are the topic of this paper. These considerations will be covered in order: 1) determining what data items to collect, 2) determining the resources to target, 3) deciding on a medium and format for storing the data bank, 4) providing a means of easy access for staff, 5) developing a means by which users can make use of the data bank, and 6) getting it all accomplished. The first five items involve planning considerations, the last item describes one working implementation.

Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Document management and text processing

    • Document management

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Management of computing and information systems