ITTS Update

Banned Books Week at the end of September featured an ambitious build of a permanent site for Banned Books and OIF programs and events. We also contracted and had a garden created in place of the skating pond and Storytelling area. Storytelling continues in this beautiful spot. All stats for the BBW programming show an increase over last year’s figures.

In October we had several programs, among them, a presentation by author Cynthia Leitich Smith on the main stage that was well received. (Image link Cynthia Zanzibar (SL name of Cynthia Letitia Smith) talks about writing for Young Adults)

We continue to ramp up activities despite lack of support from staff who have signed up in SL … few people attend our weekly meetings to orient and assist new avatars get acclimated. In the meantime, ALA members in SL are putting together programs and plans for increased support of Midwinter activities in SL to share what is happening in Denver with those who cannot attend save via SL. We will provide Twitter feeds from the Youth Media Awards, the Midwinter Twitter feed, and reports from various MW attendees who have volunteered to report on what they do in Denver. A full schedule is being developed, and meetings at MW will be focused on programming for Annual Conference in Chicago.

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

If you’ve been following along with our work on ALA Connect, you know that we had hoped to be beta testing by now, getting ready to do a soft launch heading into Midwinter. So why haven’t we announced that here?

Well, we ran into a speed bump last month that we’re just now clearing. As previously noted, all of our membership and committee data is in a software program called “iMIS,” and probably the biggest challenge we’ve faced with this project is connecting our complex membership structure to Drupal. Back in September, we excitedly noted our first success in this area (well, Urban Insight’s success, as they wrote the i2d engine that powers this).

So we were well on our way forward and when the connecting module was finished, we anxiously initiated the big import of committee data from iMIS. Which is when I learned that ALA uses the iMIS committee module for a lot more than just “committees.” For example, as our central repository of data, we use iMIS to track libraries participating in the Public Programs Office’s traveling exhibits, our list of past ALA presidents, and more. Once we saw what came over, we also realized that we didn’t really need a community for the 1999 Annual Conference.

It makes sense to keep all of this data in one place, but it quickly became clear that we needed to do some data cleanup in iMIS and find a way to flag those “committees” that aren’t really “committees,” as well as past events. We asked all of ALA’s divisions and units to pitch in and help identify these things, which they did in an amazingly fast turnaround time of one week (thanks, ALA staff!). We’ve done the cleanup in iMIS, added a flag, re-written the i2d engine, and now we’re re-importing the data, which looks a lot better in Connect. Instead of 1900+ “committees,” divisions, sections, round tables, and events, we’re down to 1,354 of them, with the added benefit of more accurate data in iMIS for other purposes, so it was worth the hiccup.

We’re back on track now, planning to start alpha testing next week. We’ve had to push beta testing into mid-January, hopefully with a soft launch in February. If all scales well, look for an official launch in March.

I know others at several associations are watching what we’re doing closely since we’re the first to be at this stage, so let me just note that if you’re one of those folks, you could do far worse than to look at your iMIS data now and check for any cleanup that needs to be done ahead of time so that you don’t run into this type of problem during your implementation.

Posted by Jenny under ALAConnect | No Comments »

The two load balanced web servers for www.ala.org were down from 8:20am-9:57am today.  These servers are redundant and should not be down at the same time.  We are looking into the cause of the outage.

Posted by Sherri under ALA Website | No Comments »