Members are also needed to help with ALA Connect testing on Saturday for about an hour between 1:30 and 3:30 PM. Testers will receive gift certificates to the ALA Store. If you are interested is volunteering for a test, contact me at lgruenberg@ala.org as soon as possible. Note that this is a new time, the previous test was set for Sunday.

The twenty-eight members of ALA who participated in the Midwinter Focus Groups will also be receiving $50 gift certificates. Their participation in the 1 1/2 hour sessions was very helpful, and has led to several initiatives to reorganize portions of the website and to reduce the number of broken links. Certificates were mailed today, so keep an eye out for them in your snail-mail.

We are continuing our investigation of factors causing occassional delays for some site users.  

• Web Services Health Check (Sherri)
  ITTS circulated an RFP to diagnose and fix sporadic reports of problem with web-based services
  we’ve been unable to replicate the problem to date, so we’re having issues troubleshooting it
• Web Tag Team Initiative (Louise)
  introduced Sheila Joy, ITTS’ new trainer (the new Louise!)
  Web Tag Team is looking at those pages on the site that have nothing tagged to them – in other words, no content
  they’ll be going through the site and tagging things they think should appear under those subject headings
  will contact web managers when they want to add a tag to a page
  more should start appearing under those pages
  will have to discuss adding new content to the page if none existsquestion: can we send the report of pages with no content around to the unit managers?
  answer: yes, although we’ll probably put it on the share drive

2. ALA Connect Update (Jenny)
we’re still scheduled to soft launch in March and launch officially in April
have a number of volunteer groups for the soft launch
one more staff Q&A session Wednesday afternoon, although we may do a few more in March leading up to the launch

3. E-petition application (Donavan)
Board wanted this for this year’s election
we’ve tried to create something all units can use so need everyone to provide feedback
works a lot like the committee volunteer applications (public and staff sides) with flexible options

4. Second Life (Donavan)
the three staff members most involved in Second Life can’t really initiate anything for National Library Week
need input, initiative, and hopefully volunteers from the divisions and offices
putting on symposia, working with an Emerging Leaders team on an in-world event, continuing to put up videos and podcasts from Midwinter, have a Twitter feed
testing a live streaming capability
gaining confidence in our ability to use this as an enhancement for presenting programs, especially given how tight budgets are
let Donavan or Tina know if you have anything on your sites you want to re-purpose into SL

5. Blogs and Wikis Migration (Matt)
see the email that went out to all staff yesterday
Matt will migrate all blogs this weekend
contact him if you have questions or if you don’t need your blog moved so that he can delete it

6. Midwinter Twitter Presentation (Jenny)
Jenny did an overview of things said about ALA on Twitter and tweets from the Midwinter Meeting

7. Keeping up with developments

Blog w/RSS Feed – http://itts.ala.org/update/
Wiki – http://wikis.ala.org/learningcollage

8. Q&A

None this time

Questions and inquiries for further information should be submitted by March 23rd, 2009 (extended deadline), and should be directed to:

Sherri Vanyek
Director of Information Technology and Telecommunications Services
American Library Association
50 East Huron St.
Chicago, IL 60611
(312) 280-2437
svanyek@ala.org

1. Website Content Management System (CMS)
   Collage, the ALA website CMS software, will be discontinued by the developers within one year.  Collage updates and support will expire within three years. WAC is taking the following steps:
   • Convene internal task force with representation from all affected units;
   • Investigate and explore options for a web content management system which is intuitive, stable, and scalable;
   • Report back progress and draft recommendations for discussion at Annual 2009.
2. Event Planner
   Members have expressed dissatisfaction with the current event planner. WAC is taking the following steps:
   • Working to implement the Event Planner in ALA Connect;
   • Will survey the membership for feedback on features and functionality during spring 2009;
   • Will report on “Event Planner in ALA Connect” progress at Annual 2009.
3. Website Content Standards
   Members report some difficulty finding things on the ALA website. Members occasionally have discovered older versions of a current web page on the ALA website. WAC is taking the following steps:
   
   • WAC is creating a task force to recommend future directions for the ALA website (meaning the website stored and maintained within the CMS); i.e. is the ALA website mainly an archive of permanent content with current content in blogs/wikis –or– is the website mainly for current information with links to other internal resources for historical documents –or– somewhere in between?
   • Task force will report recommendations to WAC by Midwinter 2010.
4. Accessibility Issues and Data Cleanup
   The ALA website has never had a full accessibility review.  ITTS staff calculate that a “full accessibility review and data cleanup” project to meet web content accessibility guidelines would take approximately ten (10) “person-years” (10 years for 1 person to do).  The code which controls display of the ALA website does not meet web standards.  With the looming need to migrate off the Collage CMS system, “clean” data is imperative to a smooth, seamless transition to a new web content management system. WAC is requesting from BARC that:
   • ALA allocate funds to perform an accessibility review at the highest priority level; and
   • ALA allocate funds to perform a data cleanup project to repair or remove non-compliant code at the highest priority level.
5. Recognition for Content Managers
   There has been a large cadre of members and staff who have undertaken the task of managing and updating content over recent years.  Without the Herculean efforts of these dedicated members and staffers, the ALA website content would not be as complete as it is. WAC is taking the following steps:
   • Formally recognize content managers for all ALA web content via several methods in relevant places within the ALA web presence.

Permissions are currently being adjusted to reflect this new policy. However, access to Contribution documents will always be available to those who need it. Division web managers are being provided with permissions to their specific  contribution folders and document types. Others who may need to make changes to Contribution documents should contact helpdesk@ala.org  to discuss their needs.

Please contact me if you have any questions.

 Louise  

Louise Gruenberg, MAE, MLS

Sr. Usability Officer

Information Technology & Telecommunications

American Library Association

312-280-1395

800-312-280-2433, ex. 1395

http://wikis.ala.org/learningcollage 

We are continuing our investigation of why the outage took place, and will be meeting with our developers tomorrow to discuss whether additional preventative actions should be taken.

Thanks for your patience and understanding, 

Louise Gruenberg, Sr. Usability Officer, lgruenberg@ala.org 

ALA will be conducting three focus groups for the website at Midwinter
only have 24-30 slots and they are filling up
going to also do some remote online sessions with members, too
- want this to be an ongoing process

Accessibility review
had them do 15 different pages on the site and we did not do well
had them test to the Web Accessibility Guidelines, level 2
places we failed include if you’re doing multimedia content, you must have a transcript, even if you offer captioning
have many global changes we have to make

in February, we will begin group webmaster meetings broken out by like units

will move to a serif typeface
discussion of how to make links easily identifiable without forcing the user to mouse over text looking for them

RSS is now easier to both implement and display in Collage
contact Louise if you have questions about this

2. ALA Connect (Jenny)

beta testing for Connect started last week and will continue through the end of the month
five groups are doing the testing, as one has dropped out
if you know of an ALA group that would like to join the beta test, please contact Jenny

when this round of testing closes, we’ll go over the feedback and start making changes in February
when we do the soft launch will depend on how many changes we need to make
the hope is to spend the first few weeks of February tweaking and fixing in order to open the soft launch in late February/early March
from there, we’ll see how well the site scales and when we’re confident it can handle the load, we’ll do an official launch with PR
we hope this will be in March, but the timeline is completely dependent on getting things right after the beta test period ends

3. Hosted web services (Matt)

Dreamhost has changed the way one-click installs work
only the main account holder can do them now because of a security change Dreamhost made
the two options are to have Matt install a database and the unit can then do the one-click install, or to just have Matt create the database and do the install
it’s probably easier to just have Matt do it
still discussing this with Dreamhost to see if we can get this setting changed back

Blog and wiki migrations
resuming the blogs and wikis migration that slowed down over the holiday break
however, we won’t move anything until after Midwinter
Matt will contact each unit individually to work with them to set up redirects and go through any other issues with the wikis

in mid-February, Matt will do a mass migration of all of the blogs still on the old b2evolution software
logins, passwords, and skins/templates won’t migrate, but content will (posts, comments, etc.)
he’ll pick one template for everyone and do the migration

4.  Second Life (Donavan)

there’s a report about what we did in SL for Banned Books Week last fall
have a fairly large agenda for Midwinter for following what’s happening
YALSA now has a “playground” they’ll be debuting there on the Friday of Midwinter, along with some publications
there will be COGnotes and AL Direct stands
on Friday, we’ll be having a Privacy Revolution party
on Saturday, we’ll be covering Librarian of the Year award
doing some simulcasting of member group meetings
will be showing some slides of Guide to Reference in-world
hope to have some info about the awards presentations and have a book award party
plus much more

there are about 1200 self-identified librarians in SL
trying to find ways to interact with them in SL

this is a significant jump from anything we did at ALA conferences last year, and it’s taking less intensive staff resources this time

5. Five Minute Guide to Twitter (Jenny)

Jenny did a quick briefing on what Twitter is, how people (and organizations) use it, and some of the benefits
takeaways include the ability to respond quickly; broadcast to one, a specific group, or many; and the real communities growing there
ALA has a few Twitter accounts already: ALA Annual, ALA Midwinter, OIF’s Privacy Revolution, YALSA, and the Youth Media Awards.

6. Keeping up with developments

Blog w/RSS Feed – http://itts.ala.org/update/
Wikis – http://wikis.ala.org/learningcollage; http://wikis.ala.org/webplanning

7. Q&A

None this time