Working with Addenda in Your Digital Catalog
December 3, 2019
Your course catalog is an official document, and most accrediting agencies have specific ways you're supposed to handle any changes to your catalog after the official document is released. Clean Catalog allows you to manage addenda easily, both in your digital catalog and in the PDF generated from your digital content.
Working with Addenda in Your Digital Course Catalog
On the digital side, our recommendation is typically to create an addendum page, and use that to list all changes. You can see an example of this on Southwestern Adventist University's Catalog. For each change they made to their digital catalog, they provided a link and listed what was changed. For most accreditation requirements, something like this can suffice.
Another option is to automatically generate date stamps on each page that's updated after the official document is released, and then list the changes on that page. For example, if you updated the description for BIO 101 on Nov. 2, Clean Catalog can automatically add a "last updated Nov. 2" timestamp at the bottom of the page, and give you a place to note the changes.
Working with Addenda in Your PDF Course Catalog
Since Clean Catalog lets you easily generate a PDF version of your catalog from your digital content, in most cases you can simply re-generate that PDF with the addenda page included, listing what's been changed. Your changes to the catalog will be reflected in the new document, you'll have an addenda page telling what's changed — and it'll take less than two minutes to generate the new PDF. That's the process we followed for Southwestern Adventist University's 2018-19 PDF, and it worked seamlessly.
In some situations, however, this might not be ideal. If you're submitting your document to the VA, it's often important that page numbers don't change, and if you've added or removed content to your catalog it will typically cause the document to reflow. In these cases, the easiest thing to do is to create a PDF of just your addendum — which Clean Catalog allows you to easily do — and attach that to the end of your PDF. That way your addendum is included, but the original page numbers remain intact.
Clean Catalog is extremely flexible software, so if none of the above meet your needs, just reach out — we can always find a solution that works.