ITTS Update

Over the years, so much has been said, written, blogged, twittered, ad nauseum about virtual members of committees, discussion groups, etc. With our participation in Second Life, ALA is making good on all the lip service by creating a virtual campus that can provide a multitude of the kinds of information and interaction that can serve a wider range of our membership who do not go to conferences and partake of the continuing education opportunities offered.

Since November, ALA has owned an island on Second Life, a virtual world where a wide variety of Web resources can be shared and explored as well as facilitating social interaction. With the assistance of San Jose State University graduate students, we have created an open-air space where we can have meetings of various size and technical sophistication as well as instruments for providing information about all of our operational units. As the Island Manager, I have been informally charged with making the island work and what I hope we will develop over the next six months as a venue for virtual membership in ALA events and conferences. Christina Coleman, Member Specialist for the Membership Office, has a similar charge and has really taken charge of organizing staff to plan our first event: National Library Week on SL.

The advantage of using SL as a platform for virtual membership is that the same electronic resources that other virtual conference applications provide are available along with the actual presence of other virtual members. Just as at a conference, people can talk in the hallways and network, virtual members in SL can talk with each and network. In fact, the way people can create profiles for their avatars, you know much more about someone than you ever would in a first-time face-to-face situation.

A core group of staff, including Valerie Hawkins from ALA Library, will be available in the sixth floor training room on a weekly basis on Thursdays from noon to one. (Members, of course, can log in from wherever they are and join us inworld: IM Oberon Octagon, Kay Tairov, or ALALibraryVal Miles .) We hope people will take advantage of these training/orientation opportunities to improve SL skills and then practice them in the way the rest of us learned how: by exploring the variety of “worlds” that exist in SL as well as by working on ALA Island.

When I presented what we are doing in Second Life at the Association Forum’s Holiday Showcase, many attendees commented that ALA always seems to be at the cutting edge of technology. Please help us continue to push the envelope.

Posted by Donavan under Second Life & Virtual Membership | No Comments »

Our external hosting partner, Dreamhost, will be relocating servers in its data center this weekend. We do not expect the applications we have on Dreamhost – including blogs, wikis, and Moodle online courses, among others – to encounter any meaningful downtime as a result of this major equipment relocation. However, Dreamhost control panel access, which a few staff members have, will be unavailable during this time. Also, it would not be a surprise to see some performance hit as the result of all of this work being in progress, as Dreamhost will be down to one DNS server from its normal three.The relocation will be taking place tonight at 11PM CDT and will last for as long as twelve hours.

Matt

Posted by Jenny under Blogs & Wikis | No Comments »

Wondering what ever became of Collage-a-Rama? Wonder no more: it’s done! On Thursday, March 20, 2008 (first day of spring, no less!), we completed the migration of all our website content to Collage. Only a handful of applications remain on the Active Matter server, where they will reside for the foreseeable future. They are things like event registration, dues manager, Cold Fusion applications, etc. Everything else, though, is now in Collage.

We are on high alert today and all next week to fix any major problems you find in the content. Broken links, a missing file or two – that sort of thing we ask staff to go in and fix yourselves. If your left navigation is missing, or your graphic design is messed up – please let us know that. We have people at the ready to fix such things.

Staff can check the schedule in the KMS if you need Collage training or a refresher.
Thanks and congrats, everyone! We have liftoff!

Rob

Posted by Jenny under CMS | No Comments »

We have resolved the routing problem that scuttled Sunday’s Sympa upgrade (thanks, Tom & Andy!).  We will be trying the upgrade again Wednesday evening, March 5, beginning at 4:30 p.m.  Since much of the heavy lifting was done in preparation for Sunday’s (non-)launch we believe we can accomplish the upgrade in just a few hours Wednesday evening.

So… Sympa will be stopped at 4:30 p.m. CST on Wednesday, March 5, 2008.  Please notify your lists as you feel necessary.  Incoming messages for all lists will be queued up and processed as soon as the upgrade is complete.  Because a) the queue time will be much shorter than Sunday’s 10 hours and b) the new server will perform better than the one Sympa is currently on, we do not expect a large backlog of messages to process, and certainly nothing that will linger into Thursday’s work hours.

Posted by admin under Mailing Lists | No Comments »

On Monday, March 10th, we will begin “Collage-a-Rama,” a two-week intensive push to get all remaining Active Matter content into Collage. Starting Monday, content on Active Matter will be frozen so that we can do a final import and deploy in Collage. We will do two “freezes,” one on Monday the 10th and one on Friday the14th (please see the calendar I sent out last week).

Content that will be frozen in Active Matter on Monday the 10th

- Advocacy Bucket

- Awards & Scholarships

- Awards Bucket

- Contacts & Questions

- Continuing Education

- ERT, IFRT, NMRT, SORT

- Events & Conferences

- Issues & Advocacy

- OIF

- OLOS

- Our Association

- Products & Publications

o Book Links

o Book Lists

o Editions

- Professional Tools

- Site Map A-Z

- SupportALA/Development Office

- Website Advisory Committee

This means that no one will be allowed to edit content in Active Matter in these sections starting Monday the 10th. If you have any urgent updates that reside in any of these areas, have them in place before 8:30 a.m. Monday the 10th. Any changes you make to content in Active Matter will be pulled into Collage during the final import and deploy. If you delete content in Active Matter, it will still appear in Collage, as the import can only pull in new and changed content. Put another way, it can’t pull in content that isn’t there. The original Collage import was done many months ago, so it’s very likely we pulled over things you have since deleted

Once the freeze has begun, we will do final imports and deploys on the sections above as we are able. You will have 24 hours to review your content in Collage and get us a list of major problems (see below). After we have fixed any major problems, we will will add a rule to the content services switch that will point all incoming traffic for your content to the Collage web servers, and your content will be live in Collage.

“Major Problems”

ITTS and Duo will fix problems with navigation and display. Individual units will be responsible for fixing broken links (most of which are broken in Active Matter, some of which will break in the conversion because they were “hard coded” in Active Matter), resolving shadow assets, and uploading missing pieces of content. If entire directories of content are missing, or all files of a certain type (say PDFs) are missing, ITTS and Duo will work together to get the missing content moved into Collage.

Please remember that a generous slate of training and support has been scheduled for Collage-a-Rama. See the “Training” tab in the KMS for specifics.

Second Freeze

The second freeze of Active Matter content will take place on Friday, March 14. Content in this freeze includes login pages and the home page. And after PIO has entered their weekly batch of press releases on March 18th, we will convert all press releases and other PIO content. This is necessary because so many other units point to or feed content in the press releases. It all needs to move over at once, then we can find links or feeds that are no longer functioning and fix them.

Then, on Wednesday, March 19th, we will “reverse the flow” on the content services switch, so that all incoming requests (with some exceptions) will flow to the Collage web servers instead of the Active Matter web server. Be aware that some things *will* remain on the Active Matter server, such as the Event Manager, Online Membership Application, and numerous databases and forms created originally on the AM server. We will migrate these applications as time and resources permit.

Posted by admin under CMS | No Comments »