LHC Website

The LHC website is built on our CMS (Content Management System), Drupal. Its development will involve four distinct efforts: Static Site, Internal Site, Repository, Community Site.

Static Site
The initial effort has been to replace the old site with a static site based on Drupal. It's 'static' in the sense that the pages don't change often, although there will be 'news' articles posted to the front page to keep it fresh. We will add image upload and rich text editing features by the end of 2007 so that interesting pages can be created by anyone with access rights. The initial design is bland, but functional. Over the first few months of 2008 we'll work out a more attractive graphic design. The underlying functionality and structure are completely independent of the graphical design.

Internal Site
The internal website uses the same Drupal base, but provides access to pages, forums, calendar items, and books that are meant for 'internal' use only. (Here 'internal' includes our volunteers and access by employees while away from the office). Drupal allows for fine-grained control of access by taxonomy (category) so that any item can be tagged with, say, 'internal' and then only seen by those with permission to see that tag. There could be other tags with greater/lesser restriction, like 'board', 'volunteer', etc. LHC employees and volunteers should use the internal site as much as possible for procedures, policies, forum discussion, calendar events, etc. The advantages to using this internal site rather than exchanging, say, email or doc files is that it's accessible from any web browser, backed up nightly, better for group interaction/comments, etc.

Repository
Through the first half of 2008 the Repository will be brought online, allowing access to the entire digital collection of LHC, including archives, oral histories, and images. Decisions will need to be made about access rights, sale of images, memberships, etc. but the technology platform will accommodate anything. Once the repository is online and 'hooked into' global search facilities like Oaister.com and digitalcommonwealth.com, we should expect much more traffic.

Community Site
The real objective is to create a site which will engage a broad community interested in Lawrence's history, both local and distant. We will be building features like a forum, event calendar, wiki, and blog platform to cultivate this community. These features take almost zero development: they are part of Drupal. The trick is launching them in a way that engages the community rather than falling flat.

There are exciting 'web 2.0' ideas that LHC could easily employ, like posting to YouTube and Flickr, and displaying those items in side-bars on the site. Or LHC could create a googlemaps 'mashup' to integrate geotagged images on a map of Lawrence. As the community grows, hopefully others will pick up on these ideas and help push the website into new territory.