ITTS Update

Emily Woodward of Denver, Colorado was randomly chosen from the group of members who took the online Website Focus Group survey. She will receive a $50 certificate to the ALA Store, courtesy of ITTS. Congratulations, Emily! We hope you have fun shopping.

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.

Posted by Louise Gruenberg under ALA Website & Usability Study | No Comments »

Investigation into system response time lead us to the discovery of a malformed query that really slowed the delivery of committee rosters on the ALA website.  The query has been repaired and when we tested, the general system performance was improved.  The original query was causing unnecessary delays in page loading. 

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

Posted by Sherri under ALA Website | No Comments »

1. Website

• 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

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

On Monday we will be upgrading the firmware in all the network switches in both buildings.  This will cause

brief outages to the ALA hosted websites but not any externally hosted sites such as ALA Connect or the new

ALA store.  We will begin with a core outage affecting all services followed by rolling outages by floor

through the day.  The schedule is as follows:

6:00am-7:00am All services will be intermittently inaccessible
8:00am  Printers and workstations located on the 5th and 6th floors of the 40 E. building
9:00am  Printers and workstations located on the 3rd and 4th floors of the 40 E. building
10:00am Printers and workstations located on the 1st and 2nd floors of the 40 E. building
11:00am Printers and workstations located on the basement and 1st floors of the 50 E. building
1:00pm Printers and workstations located on the 2nd and 3rd  floors of the 50 E. building
2:00pm Printers and workstations located on the 4th and 5th floors of the 50 E. building

After 7:00am, no global outages or website outages are expected.  All work should be complete by 3:00pm.

Posted by Sherri under Internet Service & Network Upgrade | No Comments »

We have been receiving reports of problems with some of our web-based services.  In order to troubleshoot these issues, ALA is issuing an RFP for ALA Web Services Health Check (PDF).   Please contact us to request a Network Diagram.

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

Posted by Sherri under ALA Website & Internet Service | No Comments »

The beta test for ALA Connect has ended, and we’re now working on the final issues list before soft launching the site in March. Overall, the comments we received were positive and encouraging; in fact, the comment we probably heard the most at Midwinter was, “Can’t you just launch this thing already?” So we’re working as hard as we can to do exactly that.

To help lay further groundwork for the official launch, we’re releasing an official ALA Connect Roadmap (114 KB, PDF) to provide some context and outline the service’s potential future. There are five sections to it:

1. Introduction
2. Unique Value to Members
3. Barriers to Adoption
4. Initial Metrics for Success of Phase One
5. Roadmap for Future Development

Section 5 includes descriptions of potential modules for phases 2 and 3. We’ll provide more details for phase 2 as we move into it this summer. The notion of “phases” is somewhat inaccurate, as features will be released on a continuous basis as they become available, but it provides a framework of building blocks.

Posted by Jenny under ALAConnect | 1 Comment »

At ALA Midwinter in Denver last month, we had a great Website Advisory Committee (WAC) meeting, coming out of it with several action items. You can read the full details in the official minutes (52KB, PDF), but here’s the short list of items that were reported out during the Council III session on Wednesday, January 28.

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.

Posted by Jenny under ALA Website & ALAConnect & Web Advisory Committee (WAC) | 2 Comments »