29 Sep 08 Membership Data Appearing in Connect!
Even as ALA staff work furiously to resolve issues with the new website, we’re still pushing forward with ALA Connect. If you felt the earth rumble a couple of days ago, it’s because we’re all doing the happy dance over here because the iMIS import and connection is fully functional.
That means members will be able to log into the system using their regular website login information, and Connect will automatically know which ALA groups they are affiliated with (divisions, round tables, sections, and conference registrations). We’ve had high hopes for this all along, but it’s still amazing to see it in action. In the screenshot below, you can see me logged in to view the ALSC community. Because I’m a member of the Association for Library Service to Children, I can see content posted to the group.
However, when I go to the Association for College & Research Libraries group, I’m not a member so I can’t see any content, which means the system is working as it should after the initial import.
There’s still a lot of work to do on the interface, including the creation of help documents and tutorials. All in all, though, we’re still taking 30 seconds to enjoy staring at the screen with huge grins on our faces. 🙂
Tags: drupal, iMIS, membership data
26 Sep 08 Oh, those redirects … and your bookmarks …
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
24 Sep 08 Browser Testing the New Website
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!
Tags: bugs, wac, Web Planning, website redesign
17 Sep 08 Updated Timeline for ALA Connect
Now that we seem to have cleared the iMIS hurdle, we’ve adjusted our timeframe for next steps. Urban Insight is still working on the iMIS module so that we can grab user information (not just log you in), and then we need to import data such as committees, units, rosters, etc. into the system. Going through all 1500+ active committees was…interesting, but that’s a story for another blog post.
So there’s still a lot to do, and we’re still wrestling a bit with Drupal to make it more intuitive. Given our progress so far, we project that we’ll start alpha testing with the Website Advisory Committee the first week in October. We had several groups volunteer to beta test the site (seven, to be exact), so we hope to begin involving them before the end of October. If all goes well, we’re on track for a November soft launch.
Keep in mind that phase one is the collaborative, virtual workspace for ALA committees and an online sharing space for any communities you want to create. After we get the kinks worked out, we’ll start on phase two, which will include the professional networking pieces. That’s when things get really interesting in terms of helping you make connections with the other 65,000 members of ALA.
Tags: ala connect, Online Communities
08 Sep 08 Senior Usability Officer
I am pleased to announce the promotion of Louise Gruenberg to the position of Senior Usability Officer. Louise brings to this position formal training and experience in information architecture (wire frames, interaction design, card sorts); iterative design (scenario-based, rapid prototyping); discount engineering methods (task analysis, functional analysis, heuristic evaluations); and an essential understanding of the usability lifecycle. She has been working on the implementation of the ALA’s new website design and information architecture with UserWorks (ALA’s Usability Consultants) and the Web Editorial Board. She also has extensive understanding about how to work in the Serena Collage web content management system to create site structures, left hand navigation, contribution documents and metadata forms. Her experience as an educator and trainer is another plus, as our Web developers work to convert their existing site sections and provide ongoing maintenance of them in compliance with the new Web Style Guide and Accessibility requirements.
Louise’s achievements with other organizations include analysis of an online university’s research tutorial for appropriate interaction and instructional design strategies, and management of a publications program for communications and training that included communications and print, intranet and interactive online employee awareness materials.
Louise has spoken on information architecture and usability topics at national conferences, including the Information Architecture Summit.
Louise has a M.S., Library and Information Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Master of Adult Education from National-Louis University, and B.A., Design & Experimental Educations & K-12 Teacher Certification in Art Instruction from Goddard College. Louise’s expertise will be focused on the implementation of ALA’s new website design and information architecture. She will be working with ALA’s content managers to target specific areas for immediate improvement. She will also perform ongoing usability studies for the website as required.
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Sherri Vanyek
Director, Information Technology & Telecommunication Services
American Library Association
50 East Huron
Chicago, IL. 60611
Phone: (800) 545-2433 x2437
Direct:Â (312) 280-2437
Email: svanyek@ala.org
www.ala.org
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05 Sep 08 Hey, Your iMIS Is in My Drupal
Good news to report today. It’s taken longer than anticipated, but we have our first working connection between iMIS and Drupal!
First of all, what is iMIS? If you haven’t heard us throw around this term before, it’s our membership database, and it tracks all of your dues, committee assignments, round tables and sections memberships, conference registrations, etc. It’s much more than just a database, though, as it’s also the software that lets us update committee rosters each year, send you conference registration info, etc.
We’ve known all along that ALA Connect had to be able to work with iMIS in order for us to be able to tell what your affiliations are within ALA. So it’s with great relief that we can report that last week, our developer – Urban Insight – conducted a successful test that allowed users to log in to ALA Connect (Drupal) using their regular website logins (from iMIS). This is a huge step forward for phase one, as it means you won’t have to memorize yet another login.
Even better, it means we can pre-populate a lot of your profile for you. So if you’re a member of ACRL and you serve on a committee, we’ll fill that in for you ahead of time. As we set up the virtual workspace for your committee, Connect will also give you access to it automatically within the system so that you don’t have to sign up for it manually. Three cheers for saving the user’s time!
This also bodes well for phase two of our project, in which we make all of your data start working hard for you. We hope to be able to get previous “participations,” as well as current ones, so we should be able to pre-populate your profile with all of the great work you’ve done for ALA in your professional career. That way, if you decide you want to display your profile to colleagues, potential employers, or even publicly, we’ll have created a curriculam vitae of all of your contributions. Pretty cool, right?
But I’m getting ahead of myself, as we have to get phase one out the door first. As work on the iMIS/Drupal module continues, I want to note the great work Urban Insight is doing (go, Ki!), pioneering something I know a lot of other associations are also anxiously awaiting. The folks at RSM McGladrey wrote the original iMIS web service methods (yay, Susan and Bruce!), which are working very well, so we couldn’t have gotten this far without them, either.
It’s exciting to have crossed this bridge, and we should have a new timeline to share soon. Keep watching this site for more updates.
