Archiving Previous Course Catalogs

Archiving Previous Course Catalogs

Archiving outdated content is an important piece of the course catalog puzzle, although it is often overlooked or treated as an after-thought. Here at Clean Catalog, we have a built-in archiving function that allows content to be easily archived as PDFs once an academic calendar year concludes. The digital archiving process is not only simple, but is a great practice to put into place.

You can use PDF or digital archives

While this blog post deals primarily with PDF catalog archives, Clean Catalog clients can also have multiple digital versions of their catalog at the same time. In general, however, most clients choose to use PDF archives to avoid confusion with having older catalog versions available online.

Why Archiving is Important

Although past course catalogs are typically kept in an institution’s physical archives, publicly displaying archived versions on your catalog site can be beneficial for several reasons. Firstly, most accrediting institutions also require evidence of archived catalogs, either as a URL link or exported as PDFs, when applying for accreditation or renewal. By having them live on your catalog site, you can easily link or export the required documents on an as-needed basis. It is also important for school records to have evidence of how courses change over the years, as well as data on faculty members working within a department at any given time. By having digital versions of archived catalogs, that information is easily searchable. Archived catalogs can also be a helpful resource for students and reference for current staff.

How to Archive a Catalog

The process of archiving is simple. When your institution concludes an academic year, the Clean Catalog team can archive your current catalog and publish a new catalog with no down-time to your site. We encourage our clients to stage their catalog for edits to make this process even more seamless. This allows your staff to edit your upcoming course catalog so that it is ready to publish as soon as the current academic year ends.

Displaying Archived Catalogs

When you use Clean Catalog for your course catalog, we can customize how your archived catalogs are displayed on your site. The most common method is to include PDF versions of these catalogs on a sidebar on the homepage of your catalog. We can also build a custom table of contents page that indexes these past catalogs so that they live independently from your homepage. Custom cover pages can also be added to each catalog in order to differentiate between academic years. We can fully customize the format, structure, and design of these archived publications to fit the needs of your institution.

If you’d like to learn more about archiving course catalogs or to see this in action, feel free to reach out to us.