Hinds Community College is one of an increasing number of schools committed to scaling back printed publications to support both economic and environmental goals, and to improve student services. This move calls for re-thinking the catalog revision process to move from a print-centric to web-centric authoring environment. Acalog™ was chosen both for its focus on a web-centric approach, as well as its ability to auto-generate a highly interactive e-catalog, including social media integration and a dynamic smart-phone specific interface.

In an effort to improve services for current and prospective students, Saint Francis University has selected Acalog™ as the best solution to make navigating the academic catalog easier and less time consuming. The administration is pleased that students will now be able to search for specific academic content like courses and majors without having to query the school's entire website. Saint Francis is the patron saint of animals and the environment. For the university, reducing reliance on print is one way to further the mission of Saint Francis by reducing waste and saving paper.

Utah State University adopts Acalog™ as a best-of-breed solution for academic catalog management. "We selected Acalog™ because of the larger customer base, lower cost, and unique features," said University Registrar John Mortensen. Mr. Mortensen also said an important factor in the university's decision was that Acalog™ is not a generic CMS, but a solution built specifically for managing academic catalogs.

Raritan Valley Community College chooses Acalog™. As an institution currently hosting its online academic catalog in PDF format, Raritan Valley Community College depends primarily on printed academic catalogs to serve prospective students, current students, and faculty. Finding the publication update process to be expensive, time consuming, and increasingly difficult to manage for both electronic, and printed publications, the college looked to Acalog™ to help streamline the editing and approval process. While the college initially sought to improve process, the evaluation team was pleased to find that Acalog™ would enable the school to offer students and faculty a fully interactive e-catalog front end — featuring a powerful search utility that allows site visitors to find academic information, exclusive of general website content, from a personal computer, or mobile device.

We welcome Xavier University as one of our newest Acalog™ customers. The university discontinued print catalogs in 2006, relying solely on an online PDF. Over time, it became apparent to the university that both students and faculty were finding the PDF difficult to navigate, and finding information just took too long. Xavier sought a solution that would provide an improved online experience for visitors. Their requirements included: a visually appealing presentation of academic curriculum, a robust search capability, and a streamlined workflow in which to manage content and updates electronically — and they needed all services, technology, and hosting to be provided by one off-campus vendor. After reviewing the capabilities and features that Acalog™ would provide, Xavier University found the system to be more than adequate as it provided many added values they had not expected.

We held our second annual customer appreciation reception at this year's Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers in New Orleans on April 22. More than 70 people were able to join us for drinks and hors d'oeuvres at the world famous Mulate's Original Cajun Restaurant, which is adjacent to the Ernest N. Morial convention center in the French Quarter. This year's door prize winner was Tracey Thompson, Registrar, Human Ecology, from Cornell University — one of our newest customers. Tracey was the happy recipient of a new Apple iPad. Thanks to everyone who was able to make it, and to all of our customers that were able to stop by and visit us on the vendor floor in New Orleans. See you next year in Seattle, Washington!

We're excited to be present at the American Association of Community Colleges gathering in Seattle, Washington this year, where we will be presenting a session on the new enterprise version of Acalog™. The enterprise version is a unique solution to the increasing need for community college systems to manage a common set of courses and other information across many campuses, with unique catalogs and degree plan information. Our booth number is 909. Stop by and we'll show you new features recently added to the Acalog™ e-catalog Gateway, including a smart phone interface, and social media integration.

Get ready. One of the biggest events of the year will be here soon! The 2010 American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) annual meeting will be held April 21-24 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Stop by booth number #320 to meet our team. Learn how the Acalog™ ACMS™ can help your school end the paper chase commonly associated with the academic catalog preparation, updating and publishing cycle. For more information on this year\'s conference visit: http://www.aacrao.org/neworleans/.

Walters State Community College has earned national recognition for its marketing and communications efforts. The college received a silver award for its e-catalog at the 2010 National Council for Marketing and Public Relations (NMCPR) awards ceremony held in Albuquerque, N.M. More than 1,700 submissions from over 600 community and technical colleges from across the country were entered in this year's national awards competition. Walters State utilizes Acalog™ to manage and present the college's academic catalogs. The e-catalog is available at http://catalog.ws.edu/ .

Edmonds Community College will implement the Acalog™ e-catalog Gateway to help reduce costs and to provide a more interactive catalog for students and other campus stakeholders. Stephanie Wiegan, Director of Communications and Marketing, explained that the college saw Acalog™ as a way to meet two related goals: transitioning the academic catalog into a more interactive tool for students, and providing a basis to the eventual elimination of printed catalogs -- to meet both environmental and budget goals. "We're looking at it in terms of the next decade and we'll have reduced the number of pages we print by 14 million by not printing the catalog," says Ms. Wiegand.

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