16 Feb 11 ITTS News Meeting – February 15, 2011
1. Web presence snapshot (Jenny, Louise)
In December, Keith Michael Fiels asked the Web Editorial Board (WEB) to coordinate a snapshot of activity on ALA’s various websites and channels
This snapshot will include everything from our website to social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter and will take place the week of February 28, 2011
Units will be asked to report statistics about activity on their various sites by the end of the day on Wednesday, March 9 using an online form ITTS is currently creating
Because ALA’s web-based presence is so large and diverse, we’ll only be measuring activity for “big ALA,” offices, initiatives, divisions, and round tables at this time
More information about this project, along with instructions for gathering the statistics, can be found at http://itts.training.ala.org/node/221
Please be sure to read through that page in order to understand what your unit needs to do before the snapshot starts on February 28 and afterward in order to submit your statistics by March 9
Contact Louise Gruenberg or Jenny Levine with questions
2. Wiki & blog migration status (Rob)
Any remaining sites must be migrated by April 8
The week of April 18 is when the wikis.ala.org migration will start
Once the wikis are moved over, they’ll be subject to the new notification and lock scripts so a sysadmin has to log in periodically to keep them unlocked
If you need your wiki back up quickly, contact Rob to get in the queue higher up since downtime can last up to a week
3. CMS migration (Louise)
We’re about to spin up the virtual servers in order to start implementing code
We’re going to start work on single sign-on with Connect
Currently seeking feedback on design for division templates
The ALA home page won’t change in terms of content and structure during this migration
Hope everyone is working on their web mitigation snapshots
4. iMIS 15 rollout (Sherri)
Ran into a snag with the desktop installation due to the way iMIS 10 was installed, which has delayed the project
We still plan to move to iMIS 15 in March and we’ll communicate the date as soon as we have it
It’s very similar in the way things are laid out, so there shouldn’t be a big learning curve (just some color changes)
Most of the things that are different are in the backend
5. Agreement with Verizon (Irene)
We just signed a contract to change our long-distance provider
There’s a “small conference call” option now; can have up to 20 callers for “instant” meetings at 2.7 cents/minute
If you require more than 20 callers, rate is the same but you have to call to reserve ahead of time
To set that up, call them but Irene can provide the rates
We also have the ability to do netmeetings, 17 cents/minute plus voice call
No licensing, anyone can set one up, you don’t pay for it if you don’t use it
There’s a web moderator tool where you can see your usage
Currently costs 2.2 cents per minute for 5 callers using just your phone for conference calling
Should be set up by the end of February
70 staff members are being set up with access to the interface, so watch for an email from Verizon (which might end up in your junk email folder)
Irene will send email about this as it happens
Not sure if the call has to originate at ALA – will ask
Irene set up every unit manager and a few other staff members but she can add others as needed
6. Adjourned
23 Sep 10 ITTS News Meeting – September 21, 2010
- CMS Update (Louise)
the contract is with the lawyer – we hope to have it signed in October
Louise is giving an update to Unit Managers at their October 6 meeting
- Introducing Jeff Dong, newest member of the ITTS staff (Sherri)
Jeff’s primary responsibility is for our database servers and the interaction with them (maintenance, upgrades, support, etc.)
we’re very happy to have Jeff on board
- Blogs & wikis migration (Rob)
Rob is working away on the Dreamhost migration and is making good progress; he’s already about 50% done
one thing he’s discovered during the process is that themes can get lost for blogs, so make sure you have a copy you can reapplyRob is contacting units to schedule the migrations; submit a Track-It ticket if you want to discuss timing before he contacts you
many of our wikis seem to be informational and aren’t updated much
a lot of them are getting spammed to the point where they’re unusable
Rob has developed a script that checks for any admin activity in the last 90 days
if the admin hasn’t logged in during the last 90 days, it will send an email to the address listed for that account to let them know the site is being converted to “read-only” status
this means updates/edits will no longer be possible, but Rob can always reverse the read-only status so that it can be edited if changes need to be made at some point
this will prevent spammers from creating new accounts and vandalizing the wikithe new blogs/wiki server is working amazingly well and is nice and clean - ALA Connect Updates (Jenny)
Jenny showed screenshots of the following Connect enhancements:
– Round Table statistics
– New link to download all attachments at once
– Email notifications when someone friends you
– New option to attach files to comments
– Added a direct link to the revisions page for online docs in email notifications
– Position titles now appear on rosters that synchronize with iMIS; note that if a member has two affiliations with a particular group, only the last one listed in iMIS will display in Connect; if that’s a problem, you might want to remove the affiliation you don’t want to display.
– iMIS groups can no longer be made “open” since the rosters synchronize with the member database
– We added more options for listing additional education and work history information in profiles
– Because we’ve added the time and date of an event to the email notification for it, we now require you to pick a time zone; if you don’t, it will say “no time zone selected” instead of listing a time zone, so please be sure to pick one!We also upgraded chat a few weeks ago; there have been no reports of users getting kicked out of chat rooms since the upgrade was installed.
There are some new features that came with the upgrade (see next blot post for more details), but you can now:
– Pop the chat out into its own window
– Pause autoscrolling
– Make the box you type in bigger by pulling down the bottom border of the boxRight now, we’re working on offering the ability to do “drafts” so that you can start writing something and stave it but not publish it yet.
This fall, we’ll be working on the new conference scheduler (used to be known as the “event planner”) and giving each group its own file repository. We’re also going to redesign the Connect home page and group home pages so that they’re easier to read and use.
These three major projects will take up the bulk of our time, so there won’t be a lot of smaller enhancements until either December or January.
- Web Application Firewall (Sherri)
everything will be down when this is being worked on
will be between 5-60 minutes at 5pm on Wednesday, October 6 (which is our normal maintenance time) - KM System (Irene)
we’ll be upgrading the KMS starting at 2pm this Friday (/24)
it should be back up in a couple of hours, but if you access it during that time and notice something strange, it’s because the system is being upgraded in the background - Web Editorial Board update (Karen)
meeting summaries are publicly posted to its Connect space, with an email notice sent to unit managers
there’s a special WEB meeting next week to discuss what needs to be done in preparation for the migration
the overall message: be prepared to spend some time working on your unit’s content to make it clean and validthe Library has become less reactive to questions and more proactive to get the information out there and reorganized ahead of time
they’ve have been working on the Guidelines and Standards section, the Library FAQ Sheets, an A-Z of topics
they’re also doing interventions in major areas because then the number of questions about that subject drop when work is done to address problems
one of the problems has been the Policy Manual, which was originally posted as a straight translation of the print version to the web (150 print pages as one long scrolling page)
– the Library has redone it, with Rebecca taking the lead to work with Lois Ann and the Governance Office
Karen showed work that was done to make it a true web document, such as making the data that needed to be in tables accessible, adding anchors for navigation, and adding a section for recent changes
they’re still building the left navigation
ITTS fixed everyone’s links to the Policy Manual and deployed the pages so the links wouldn’t break
please be sure to link to the new version, rather than reproducing it (or sections of it) elsewhere on the sitethe Library has begun working with OIF to restructure some of its pages and is starting another project with the Governance Office
23 Jul 10 ITTS News Meeting – July 20, 2010
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New CMS vendor selection (Louise)
Will email a survey link to the folks who attended to get detailed feedback
Asked for feedback about the first vendor meeting on Monday
Next vendor is scheduled to come in on Thursday
Hope to make an announcement sometime after August 1 so the lawyers can start on the contract -
ALA Connect (Jenny)
Recent enhancements to Connect include:
– Rotating banners on the home page to help highlight all of the new features and changes
– You can now compare versions of online docs to see what actually changed (the way you can on wikis or on new press releases). Just go to the “revisions” tab on an online doc, select which two versions you want to compare, and click on the “show diff” button.
– In the email notifications for updates to online docs, we’ve added a line that links you directly to the revisions page so that you can immediately go see what’s changed.
– Right now we’re working on implementing HTML formatting in email notifications in order to make them more legible. We know it’s difficult to read blocks of unformatted text, so we hope to make this easier.
– In the last two weeks, three new versions of the chat module have been released, so we’re currently testing the latest one to see if we can go live with it to try to resolve the problems that some users encounter when using the chat function. We’ll report back on the testing soon but even if it’s successful, we believe the links to past chats will still be broken, so we’ll again have to give folks time to archive their chats before implementing the new version on the live site. More news on the blog as we have it.MemberFuse pilot restarting
This is the project to test some software called MemberFuse to see if it’s a potential replacement for Drupal to run Connect. Although we got some good feedback from a handful of folks in late May and early June, things kind of died off as we got into Annual. We’re going to add a few more testers and restart the pilot so that it runs July 26 – August 15. If any staff person wants totry it out and give us feedback, please contact Jenny to get access. -
WEB report (Louise)
Inventory project
inventorying each unit’s pages and deleting unneccesary ones
took three weekends to finish the inventory of each unit’s content
only removed content that had already been removed from the website by someone in the unit, so no live pages should have disappeared
we removed 20,000 pages, so we hope that will help with deploys since we’re not trying to publish thousands of removed pages anymore
HTML Tidy project
we had a version customized for us to remove font tags, inline formatting, and non-XHTML compliant code, as well as alert us to other accessibility issues
we have to take files from the website, run them through HTML Tidy, and then return them to Collage
we’ll be starting to run the program on unit’s files but will coordinate with each unit because we have to lock out authors during the run so that the files don’t change
units will receive a before and after “snapshot” of the changes to show the differences
it took Rebecca less than a minute to make most of the changes suggested for the Library’s pagesquestion: what are the options for loading new CSS files in Collage for migrating tables?
answer: we can figure out a way to add the necessary code, hopefully as a universal solution for everyoneLouise showed the newish Online Learning section of the website since it’s gone live since our last meeting
we’ll be adding Round Tables as contributors
trying to get all units to use the templates for uniform display of informationLouise also showed the revamped Conferences & Events section of the website
work was done to condense the “calendar of events” area down to three: affiliates & chapters, American Libraries Magazine’s, and a new list of celebration/promotional weeks/days -
Moodle upgrade to 1.9.8 (Rob)
happening on Wednesday, July 21, around 5:30pm
the current content will be copied onto a brand new server using the latest version of Moodle
classes.ala.org may be down for up to 4 hours while the DNS propagates
there don’t seem to be any interface changes, although there are a lot of new report options available for instructors; most folks shouldn’t notice any change at all.
we’ve posted an announcement on the Moodle site for the last week and did a post on the ITTS blog last week -
Knowledge Management System (Sherri)
ITTS has worked with the Library to add “expertise” and staff photos to the staff directory in the KM system
Sheila is working on documentation for how staff can add information to both; it should be ready in mid-August
all you need is a square image of yourself to add your picture
Karen showed how to use the expertise directory to find who in the building is a notary public, just as an examlpe -
Dreamhost Application Migration (Tim)
we’re migrating from a single, private server on Dreamhost to two new private servers on Dreamhost
why now?
because we have some intrusions on our current server that are serving up pharmaceutical ads
this happened because we have a lot of blog and wiki software on Dreamhost that is very out-of-date
going forward, we’ll be upgrading all blog and wiki software at once as soon as new versions become available
the main issue will be that if you have a custom theme for your site (in other words, you’ve changed a default one in some way), you may have to re-install it after the upgrade
unfortunately, whole domains will have to be moved at the same time (eg, pio.ala.org, alcts.ala.org, etc.), so Rob will work with each unit to coordinate timing
for content you don’t need anymore, ITTS can archive it on a DVD, although that will just be the data and not necessarily a way to easily view it; we’re investigating options for this.
if you want to make a site an online archive, we can migrate it and make it uneditable so that it can’t be spammed
we’ll also be increasing security, like requiring secure FTP, changing everyone’s passwords, and encouraging strong password use
on the plus side, the new servers will run much faster and perform better -
Please submit your help requests through Track-It.
The best description possible in the Track-It ticket helps us resolve your issues faster.
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28 May 10 ITTS News Meeting – May 25, 2010
New Content Management System Selection Update
Sherri gave an update on where we are in the selection process for a new content management system for http://www.ala.org.
- Altogether ALA received 47 proposals from which the CMS Task Force, comprised of members of the Website Advisory Committee (WAC) and staff, selected 7 candidates.
- The same Task Force then completed a 41 page survey created by Louise Gruenberg that evaluated the proposals submitted by the 7 candidates.
- The results of that survey identified our top 3 candidates and those candidates have now been given a document with additional questions so we can compare all 3 candidates equally on their responses.
- The names of the top 3 candidates will be announced once we notify the 44 vendors who were not selected.
ALA Connect Update
The Opportunties Exchange
Jenny encouraged any unit that has opportunities such as scholarships, grants or internships to add them to ALA Connect’s Opportunity Exchange (OppEx). OppEx is a database where anyone can search for assistantships, awards, calls for proposals, volunteer opportunities, and more. Connect members can indicate within their individual profiles the opportunities that they seek and will get additional email notices when new opportunities are added to the OppEx. Anyone who is posting an opportunity needs to login to ALA Connect to access the form.
Staff Liaisons Should Notify Committee Members about Access to Connect Groups Change Over on June 30th
Jenny reminded everyone to have their iMIS Committee Rosters up-to-date with the correct term dates for all members. All committee members whose terms end on June 30, 2010 within an iMIS Commitee Roster will only have access to their Connect groups until midnight that night. Any incoming committee member whose term begins July 1, 2010 will not have access to the Connect group until July 1st at 12:01 AM
Chat Upgrade
Jenny discussed where we are at with updating the Chat Module.
MemberFuse Pilot Project Update
Jenny discussed the MemberFuse Pilot.
Tech at Annual
A Networking Uncommons area will be set up at Annual Conference as it was at Midwinter. This is a location where groups can meet informally and have access to resources such as projector, digital recorder, iPod with microphone, a webcam and a flip cam. If any group wants to gather in the Uncommons and have any of these resources available to them at a specific time, they can go to the ALA Annual Wiki at http://annual.ala.org/2010 and on the index page go to Connecting with Other Attendees>New at Annual: Networking Uncommons. On the Networking Uncommons page is a link to a Schedule. There is a page for Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday with reservation times slots from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. Add a Presenter/Convenor Name, Topic and make sure to list what technology resources you would like to use in the Resource column.
Web Editorial Board (WEB)
WEB is adding taskforces to involve staff stakeholders in the following four areas:
- Social Media
- Archiving & Digital Asset Management
- Branding, Marketing & Design
- Communication & Education
If any staff member would like to be a part of any of above groups and help move the association forward in these areas please contact webeditorialboard@ala.org.
The Social Media Working Group has already met to discuss strategies and created an ALA Connect Community. As part of this group, Jenny will be offering “Let’s Talk About Twitter” Lunch and Learns in the weeks before Annual.
All sessions will take place in the training room from 12:00-1:00 pm.
- Thursday, May 27
- Wednesday, June 9
- Wednesday, June 16
The sessions will highlight some Twitter basics, such as the difference between replies and direct messages, the use of hashtags, why you should use URL shorteners, and more. Our focus will be on how to use Twitter well during Annual, but the concepts will be applicable to your unit’s general use of this interactive channel. The official ALA hashtag for Annual is #ala10.
Annual Base Camp is currently planning showing a Twitter Feed on the www.ala.org home page to showcase the excitement of Annual Conference.
All units are encouraged to contact the Web Editorial Board for guidance with their web presence. Currently WEB is assisting the units with the creation of an eGovernment Tool Kit and possibly merging the Help Get a Job site with JobList.
New Internet Administrator: Rob Berquist
Rob Berquist was introduced at the meeting. He has joined ITTS as our Internet Administrator and he will be responsible for the administration of Blogs, Wikis, Moodle, Sympa and other internet resources.
Other
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