14 Jan 09 ITTS Update Meeting – January 13, 2008
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
