ITTS Update

There are a number of usability tests of the division websites scheduled at conference. Interested members should contact their division web content manager to volunteer.

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.

Posted by Louise Gruenberg under ALA Website & ALAConnect & Usability Study & Web Planning | 1 Comment »

At the Midwinter Website Advisory Committee meeting, a subcommittee formed to help implement a new conference event planner in ALA Connect. This group has put together a survey to help us learn what members want improved/fixed/added/changed about the current event planner.

You can help us out by completing the survey and giving us specific suggestions for what would help you. If you’ve ever complained about using ALA’s event planner (or even if you haven’t), now’s your chance to actually *do* something about it. Don’t just mutter under your breath - mutter to us. 

The survey will be open through July 19, 2009, and anyone can take it, including non-members. All of the feedback received will help us shape the new event planner, which we hope to implement for the 2010 Midwinter Meeting.

Thank you to WAC members Dave Hargett, Rebecca Jackman, Mary Popp, Jean Rainwater, and William Reed for their invaluable help with this project.

Posted by Jenny under ALAConnect & Web Advisory Committee (WAC) | 1 Comment »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

1. Website (Louise)

Critical things you need to know about:

a. You need to fill out the new SEO (Search Engine Optimization) metadata fields because they are now required; if you get an error message on check-in about a required field not being filled out, it’s probably a metadata field

question - we can use phrases, too?
answer - yes, just separate them by commas

need congruency between the metadata title field and the actual title field - they have to match for the alphabetization to work properly on the listings pages

b.  Some listing pages are still blank (eg, “Government Documents,” even though we have a whole Round Table devoted to this topic) and need content. Karen Muller will tag the things she knows are applicable, but it’s going to take a coordinated effort - everyone needs to pitch in to the areas that are relevant to them, because if we don’t add the content, we need to take down the aggregated pages.

c. We’re seeing some problems with Firefox 3 - Collage won’t let you upload anything (images, etc.). We also think we’re having transaction problems on the site with FF3, so if you receive a complaint, please ask the user if they are using this version of the browser. We’re trying to determine if we have a systematic “superbrowser compatability problem” or if it’s an isolated issue.

Please help us track this issue and let us know when you hear about problems with slow pages, authentication issues, etc.

2. Web Editorial Board (Louise)

Louise noted a handout about the purpose of the Web Editorial Board Tag Team, a group that has rights to the entire site and can make quick fixes without requiring permissions first. These are considered “Tier 1″ changes, and the Team will always communicate changes to the owning unit, even if it’s afterwards. The charge empowers the team to handle these types of issues.

Tier 2 fixes will have the Tag Team contacting the owning unit before making the suggested changes.

Tier 3 would be things the Team discusses with you and you then change.

The approach will be an ad-hoc one, although we may split up the work to handle specific sections of the site.

If you have questions about any of this, contact Louise or Karen Muller.

3. ALA Connect (Jenny)

Jenny showed the prototype, pre-alpha testing site for ALA Connect to give staff a sense of how the site functions

4. Keeping up with developments (Sherri)

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

5. Q&A / Wrap up

Posted by Jenny under ALAConnect & CMS & ITTS Update meetings & Web Editorial Board | No Comments »