ITTS Update

An inadvertent change to a file in the Project > Contribution area of Collage took the website down for three hours on Monday morning. To prevent such an incident from reoccurring, ITTS is changing access permissions so that most ALA staff and member-volunteers will no longer be able to edit in the Project > Contribution Setup area. This is the part of Collage that controls the folder types and document types, not the Content tab, which is where content is created and edited. Most member-volunteers and staff accomplish their tasks in the Content and Deploy tabs, which are still fully available to them.

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 

Posted by Louise Gruenberg under ALA Website | No Comments »

We’re halfway through our beta test period for ALA Connect, and things are going pretty well. Preliminary feedback is positive, so we seem to be on the right track overall.

To help provide some background, especially for anyone who wants to discuss Connect at Midwinter, we’re providing an Introductory FAQ for ALA Connect (67kb, PDF). We tried to keep it short, so it’s not designed to answer every question or provide any detailed information beyond phase one of the project.

Please feel free to distribute it to interested parties and ask questions here. You can also send me questions at jlevine@ala.org.

Posted by Jenny under ALAConnect | No Comments »

We experienced a major outage of the website this morning, and were able to get the site up around noon, CST. Today is a holiday at ALA, which meant that staff weren’t working in the building. That slowed our knowledge that there was a problem. Our thanks to those members who used the site’s feedback form to alert us to the problem so that we could begin troubleshooting. Our main focus was on locating the cause of the problem and getting the site back up, and it is only now that we have been able to take a deep breath and communicate to you.

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 

Posted by Louise Gruenberg under ALA Website | No Comments »

The Midwinter WAC meeting will be held on Monday, January 26, 2009, from 8:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m., in Room 602 of the Denver Convention Center. At this point, committee members who have agenda changes or additions should bring them to the meeting.

Here are the documents we’ll be referring to during the discussion.

• 2009 Midwinter WAC Meeting Agenda – Draft (PDF, 79kb)
• 2009 Midwinter WAC Meeting Report (PDF, 97kb)
• Report from the Task Force on Electronic Member Participation (PDF, 219kb)
• Report from the Task Force on Electronic Member Participation, Appendices B-E (PDF, 108kb)
• Report from the Task Force on Electronic Member Participation, Survey Appendix (PDF, 195kb)

Posted by Jenny under Web Advisory Committee (WAC) | No Comments »

1. ALA Website (Louise)

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

Posted by Jenny under ALA Website & ALAConnect & Blogs & Wikis & ITTS Update meetings & Second Life | No Comments »

Time somehow sped up in December, and now I suddenly find myself on the other side of January 1. I meant to post here in mid-December that we were running a brief alpha test with the Website Advisory Committee. Despite the proximity to breaks from work, a few, very dedicated members of WAC did in fact log in to the system to play around and give us some feedback. Overall, their response was positive, with only a couple of major problems identified.

We then continued tweaking and resolving and generally fixing things up so that we could start beta testing this week. Consider this the blog post announcing that we started beta testing this week with six different groups. The test period will run through Midwinter so that the content posted is available to these groups during their meetings. In February, we’ll go back to tweaking and resolving and generally fixing things up based on the feedback from these folks.

So we’re getting closer, and for me it’s exciting to see how the site is taking shape. I’m getting inquiries from other associations interested in the iMIS to Drupal connections, as is Urban Insight. Since we’re not ready to release the module into the wild yet, the good folks at UI wrote a short paper about how it works – Integrating Drupal and iMIS: ALA Connect Case Study. Hopefully that will help tide folks over until the code is released in the next month or two.

Posted by Jenny under ALAConnect | No Comments »