After 29 printed editions, JISC Inform 30 will be going online. We thought fellow communications teams and individuals in education, faced with the same challenge, might like to know how we are taking an established printed publication and moving it to work on the web. This is new for us and you could say a little out of our comfort zone.
As universities and colleges are under increased pressure to reduce their costs, printed to digital is one way to achieve possible savings not just financial but also environmental. And with the trend for moving campus prospectus online, how we go about making this transition happen could help you do the same.
For those of you who have regularly received your printed copy of Inform each term, thank you for your feedback and we hope you’ll enjoy this new version. The idea is that in the future you’ll be able to access Inform via your mobile device, ebook reader or computer whenever and wherever you are. This is the vision, so our first digital version will be a stepping stone.
We are aiming to create:
- The look and feel of a printed publication but as interactive webpages
- A flexible publication that can be read as a single magazine or as standalone articles and click through to other content on the web
- A space for your to add your content.
So why share this journey with you?
Putting something on a website sounds simple enough….
So we are left with a lot of questions about what we thought JISC Inform could become and what it could look like.
This is where our journey begins….we have questions, lots of questions. How will it work technically? What content are we going to include? What will it look like? How will people read it and access it? Will our well established 10,000 readership of the printed Inform move with us? How do we create a whole new experience for our readers?
JISC Inform 30 will be launching in March 2011 as a beta site.
We’re not sure that we’re going to get it right first time but we hope you find the journey of interest, as we weave our way through making it happen.
One reply on “JISC Inform – from print to digital”
Glad you are going to be blogging the experience – I’m going to do the same I think – looks like I’m going to be running a project to move both the Annual Review and in-house magazine to digital versions so we’ll just be a bit behind you!