ITTS Update

1. Website Redesign/IA Rollout (Sherri and Karen)

the website is a work in progress
we’ve been focusing on stability issues with the ActiveMatter server (forms, ecommerce transactions, etc.)
- updated the Access databases to Microsoft SQL databases, restricted access to a small number of IP addresses to help address this issue
- this also let us restrict search engines from indexing old content
- got rid of tagged pages from the old ActiveMatter server

we’re in the process of upgrading to a new server with more disk space and a faster processor
- hope to have that done in the next week

working with Duo on tagged content displays, division news feeds, and RSS feeds on the home page

a few weeks ago, a few of us met with Michael Stephens, the current chair of the Web Advisory Committee and came up with two objectives for the site
- for current information (this requires a systematically consistent approach for tagging, etc.)
- a marketing tool

the Web Editorial Board will try to lead several initiatives in these areas
- encouraging staff with web responsibilities to add keeping the site current as a goal on their evaluations
- need some quality control to achieve this; will allow us to set goals (”get your shadow assets down 10% from where it is today,” etc.)
- revamping the Web Editorial Board into two separate teams
- “tag team” - will review the site structure, will consult with offices on restructuring content; create standards; review and finalize the web style guide; examining the website to determine to what extent it should be used as an archive; examining advantages and disadvantages of decentralized site management; tagging items for listing pages; checking for ALT text on images; proper page headlines; use of transcripts for audio and video files; procedural documentation; etc.
- “communications impact team” - encourage use of images, pods, etc.; consulting with units to develop individual areas of the site for maximum effect; optimizing pages; accessibility issues

the Web Editorial Board is going to expand and add more members

2. ALA Connect (Jenny)

just got back from vacation yesterday so hasn’t had a chance to check in with the development site to see recent changes made to the functionality
Urban Insight has successfully imported the active committees from iMIS and categorized them into “communities” (currently divisions), “committees,” and “events”
hope to have a demo to show on November 18, as we are hoping to alpha test in November and beta test in December for a roll out before Midwinter in January

3. Wiki Migration (Matt)

all wikis currently hosted at wikis.ala.org will be moved to Dreamhost domains because the wikis.ala.org server was never really intended to house these applications
Matt will be able to migrate 6-8 wikis each week without requiring the wiki owners to do anything
he’ll send out a message about this today or tomorrow
he’ll change nothing about your wiki, other than the beginnings of the URL (”wikis.ala.org/acrlwiki” will become something like “acrl.ala.org/acrlwiki” in the domain unless you specify otherwise) - basically, “wikis” just becomes your acronym

migrating the wikis to Dreamhost has some other benefits, including the addition of an audio captcha for spam control

all of this will happen over the next 4-5 weeks, and Matt will notify you when this is happening for your site
while your wiki is migrated, it will be down for 1-2 hours

everything in your current wiki will get migrated, including content, users, blocked users, images, files, etc.

4. Virtual Private Hosting (Matt)

if you already have blogs, wikis, or Moodle on Dreamhost, you may have noticed that it slows down from time-to-time
but earlier this month, we upgraded to “virtual private hosting” service, which means we’re now paying a monthly fee for reserved processor time and more importantly, memory

this means we’ll no longer be throttled back when other users overload the server, so speed and response time should improve dramatically and should be more consistent
we also have no maximum ceiling now, as our usage is burstable

if you do encounter problems, let Matt know right away because he has more options for troubleshooting now (such as rebooting our virtual server)

Moodle chat now works (insofar as Moodle chat works)

Matt also noted that when you use FTP on Dreamhost, make sure you’re using your domain name (eg, rusa.ala.org), rather than a server name

5. Meeting room resources in Outlook (Sherri)

coming soon - we’ll be implementing the ability to book meeting rooms in Outlook
just have to get this set up and will then send out a tech tip about it

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

Posted by Jenny under ALAConnect & Blogs & Wikis & ITTS Update meetings & Online Communities & Web Editorial Bd & Web Planning | No Comments »

As has often been noted, it is impossible to make a souffle without cracking some eggs. We are in the process of transforming 60,000 pages so that any of them that link through the left navigation end in index.xml, a method that allows users to get to them by typing in the name of the parent directory. Others have been detached from their navigation and grouped onto listing pages with like information, to make it more convenient for users to locate information by topic. (Yes, topical aggregation, a concept familiar to librarians everywhere.) The topical groupings also make it possible for us to review documents generated by any ALA unit and to plan for updating and logical expansion of the available offerings.

Sixty-thousand redirects was and is far more redirects than we have the staff to make, and what that many redirects would do to the website speed of delivery makes me cringe. Common redirects to the division, round table, and office pages have been updated and deployed. Now that the site has been launched, we can analyze the 404s (page not found) to help us determine which redirects are really needed. Naturally, your bookmarks have broken, since many site resources have been relocated and in some cases, renamed. Whether you believe it or not, we lost a lot of sleep over the issue of the redirects. We did put server rules in place to funnel users to content. And Karen Muller of the ALA Library has been responding to requests for information on the location of ‘misplaced’ files in a very timely fashion, via the feedback form on the site.

Our Google appliance crawled the staging site, which was necessary to test it. Unfortunately, it cached more information than we expected. When the staging site files were moved to become the new live site, the search results still provided some links pointing to staging, where the files no longer existed. Starting at 5:00 today, we are clearing the appliance and resetting it to crawl the live site continuously over the weekend.

This was, as you may have noticed, more than a redesign. It is a user-centered reorganization of the site’s resources, and there will be additional user testing at Midwinter to further refine our approach. I hope you will take the time to explore the site, become familiar with its new structure, and that over the next year, you will see continuous improvement in usability and accessibility, as well as an expansion of the materials available.

I welcome your feedback, either here or via that aforementioned website feedback form. I also get those messages. ; )

Louise Gruenberg

Posted by Louise under IA Implementation on Website & Web Planning & Website Search | 1 Comment »

The Website Advisory Committee is proactively helping us find bugs in the new website now that it’s officially live, so Aaron Dobbs started a new area on the Web Planning wiki for tracking browser-based bugs. If you’re the intrepid type and you’d like to help out with this, please pick a browser and OS and start listing any problems you encounter with the website on the wiki. Thanks!

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

All of ALA is working hard to get everything ready on the new website. We’re still a couple of weeks away from “flipping the switch,” but you can see the progress at http://ala.org/preview. For updates on the progress as we near the launch, we’ve started a new page at http://itts.ala.org/update/current-website-progress/, which will be the official place to find the latest status report. The list of 10 key performance objectives are listed there at the moment, and we’ll start updating progress on them after Labor Day.

We’re just as excited as you are to be so close to the big event!

Posted by Jenny under CMS & IA Implementation on Website & Usability Study & Web Planning & Website Search | No Comments »

The notes from the 2008 Annual Website Advisory Committee meeting are now available (PDF, 171KB). If you have questions, please post them in the comments so that we can answer them for everyone. Thanks!

Posted by Jenny under ALAConnect & Web Advisory Committee (WAC) & Web Planning & Website Search | No Comments »

1. Web

* Website Redesign - http://staging.ala.org/preview (Karen)
Change in where you’ll post information to within the website
Might not be “under your office” by default anymore – might be where it best fits by topic
Membership units vs. organizational units - organizational units might have reduced number of pages under “their” section; instead, content from all units will get mashed together by topic
Showed “contact us” as one new, revamped area

Toured the various left-hand navigation menus and explained what is now in each of them (eg, scholarships are now in “education,” not “awards”)

Have broken the news up into 3 main categories
- National/International Views - regular news from American Libraries
- Inside ALA = our press releases
- Legislation & Advocacy

* Knowledge Management System (Karen)

The KM system has a new look!
Toured the new interface
Showed list of magazines checked in today
Showed how you can search databases without having to log in to each one
Site now shows a tag cloud of resources the Library is bookmarking in del.icio.us

* Website Redesign (Rob and Louise)
Some of the new IA is going to be created by staff tagging via a new tagging system
The tagging matches the IA exactly – it’s only available on “ALA live” document type
Showed how to tag items in Collage
Question about rolling up an ACRL event up to Upcoming ALA Events - will check on that
Division sites may become smaller as their resources are located in more main areas
If a division uses this, the page will appear branded elsewhere in the site, not just within the division’s pages

* New Google Search Features (Rob)
Just before Annual, Rob installed some code behind the search box on the home page of the preview ONLY
Google Search Appliance doesn’t do pagerank, so we’ve been working with a consultant to improve the SERP – Search Engine Results Page
First hit (if available) will be an “ALA suggestion” that we configure (example, Newbery)
We can put in any number of these
Next set of hits will be “results from Google” that do use pagerank because the search is run from the big Google search engine; set is limited to ala.org hits
Last section is results from content on our server, which has been cleaned up considerably
- this content is more granular; it just doesn’t have the same sheen of authority that Google or the direct keyword match give it
This customized SERP will eventually be the default for every results page
Have the ability to customize sections for searching and to brand search results for divisions/units
Still have to work with the consultant on including search results from blogs and wikis

Will present two options for implementing the redesign at the unit manager’s meeting tomorrow; decision will be noted in the meeting minutes

** Note that the decision was made to freeze the site for 30 days to do the migration
** Watch for more details about this here on the blog

2. Association 2.0

* Online Communities Update (Jenny)
not much to report yet but work is continuing
Drupal has been installed for about a month, and Urban Insight is installing modules and implementing the interface
work is beginning on the iMIS authentication
the response at Annual was very positive - many members are looking forward to using the new service
Jenny will be doing a task analysis for each module/tool and will post the steps to this blog - please have your committees provide feedback on these! thank you

* New Capabilities (Matt)
Matt will be providing instructions soon for how to migrate your b2e blog or wiki from the ALA server to Dreamhost

* Demo of how to use OPAL (Sherri and Jenny)
Sherri and Jenny logged into an OPAL room with member Aaron Dobbs
Sherri spoke with Aaron via voice over IP through the computer while Jenny communicated with Aaron via a text chat window

ALA has 4 OPAL rooms available for staff and members to use - 2 rooms with 25 seats each, 1 with 50 seats, and 1 with 100 seats
ALA staff and/or members can use these for meetings, discussions, presentations, and other ALA-related activities for free right now
members can reserve a room by contacting their staff liaisons

Louise sent out documentation for how to book these rooms in Outlook back in March and they are loaded in the KM systemOPAL offers text chat with the option to save the transcript, co-browsing, audio discussions, a whiteboard, and uploading of files for a meeting
the audio portion can be saved to your desktop as an MP3 file you can then post to a blog as a podcast
- or you can post the audio file to a web page so others can download or listen to it (this is not called a “podcast,” though)

you can password-protect a room for private discussions
you can have one way audio for just the presenter

staff are encouraged to purchase a headset to use with OPAL if they are going to use it more than once or twice, as it’s much easier to hear and be heard this way
headsets are not very expensive and can be purchased for around $25 - Maribeth has information if you’re interested

3. 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

4. Q&A / Wrap-Up
No questions at the end this time

Posted by Jenny under ALAConnect & IA Implementation on Website & ITTS Update meetings & KMS & Online Communities & Web Planning & Website Search | No Comments »

A sneak preview of the redesigned ALA website is now available at http://www.ala.org/preview .  This is a semi-working version, so expect errors!  In the quick links along the bottom of the header, only Divisions and Round Tables have any content in them at the moment.  Know also that if you click on the “more” link below one of the three news sections, you will be taken back to the old design because we haven’t moved that content into the staging area yet.  Also, shortcuts you might have come to use (such as www.ala.org/lita) do not work on the staging site.  That is to say, http://www.ala.org/lita will work, but staging.ala.org/lita will not. Redirects will all work as expected when we move to the live site.  As of 4:00 p.m. today, we have not been able to make the highlight images “clickable.”  Again, you will be able to click on a highlight image when the site goes live.

Please let us know what you think by writing us a comment, below.  We will continue to work on the site over the next few weeks, so come back often.  We  expect to have the site much more “fleshed out” by Annual Conference at the end of June.

Posted by Rob Carlson under Web Planning | 4 Comments »