Looking for courses to take this fall will be a lot easier, says the registrar's office, thanks to a new and improved online Courses of Study.

As of July, the listing of course descriptions is accessible via a database-driven online content management system.

"The new online Courses of Study is much more accurate than either the old online version or the paper copy that the old version was based upon," said Cassie Dembosky, university registrar.

Because the old version was updated on paper, the editing started about five months before publication with no changes permitted after the April before distribution in August, she said; and any new courses, new faculty or course changes made after April could not be included in the old paper version.

With the new content management system, called Acalog, changes can be made at any time. "We are making changes to courses on almost a daily basis," said Marisa LaFalce, program coordinator for the Office of the University Registrar.

The search feature in the new site is much more robust and user-friendly than in the previous online course catalogs, allowing searches by subject and keyword, she said. For people who liked to bookmark or dog-ear pages of the book so that they could easily find certain pages or sections, the online version allows users to tag favorites to easily return to courses they are interested in.

In addition, the new online version "is polished and sophisticated, making a good first impression on prospective students and serving as a resource for guidance counselors and parents," Dembosky said.

Also, alumni can easily transfer descriptions of the courses they took at Cornell for various kinds of applications, she said. At the end of each calendar year, the online Courses of Study will be archived but still accessible to all users to preserve a historical record of the courses, Dembosky said.

The new system will save the university significant costs: In recent years 9,800 copies of the thick reference work were printed each year; these have been eliminated. The amount of work put into the former Courses of Study by staff all across campus, with paper documents circulated for multiple iterations and corrections, was tremendous, LaFalce said. Many departments used the past year of conversion to clean up their data, so by next year, the entire electronic process will be smoother and more efficient, she said.

"This was not just about saving trees or money, but about how to make a better product more efficiently," Dembosky said. "Thanks to the help of everyone across campus -- the staff in the departments and registrars' offices as well as in the central Registrar's Office -- the conversion to the Acalog system has been nearly seamless."

The new Courses of Study can be found at http://www.courses.cornell.edu.