Building A Shared Web Vernacular: A Web Content Style Guide for Academic Libraries

Drupal has been a huge hump to climb. I wish I was writing today to share news about our website launch, but regrettably we’re still working at it. Still pushing the rock up the hill and dutifully coming back down to try it again when setbacks arrive. This process has been marred with so many unexpected challenges—one day I hope to be able to share this epic tale of determination.

The short version is that we lost two programmers in January so that has stalled our production significantly. Thankfully we've been working all along with a great design firm, PING V, who are Drupal experts. If you are considering moving into Drup I highly recommend them.

In more positive news… one of the big efforts we’ve made is tackling hundreds of pages that have been written over the years by numerous people and editing them for consistently. This has been a laborious task—getting the content clean, correct, and contemporary for modern readers. A lot of it has been driven toward simplifying what we present to web visitors.

When we started this project a year ago we looked for web style guides from other libraries, but didn’t really find any examples. So I offer you ours: UCSB Library Web Content Style Guide. This is largely the work of Jane Faulkner and Jen Dallape.

About 75% of our content has been re-written and uploaded according to this document, but the holdup is theming. I have much more to share, but until we launch it’s all just hot air and speculation. If your library has a style sheet I’d love to compare. Post a link or email it to me, please.

Two books that have been very helpful with the content development process are: