23 Jul 10 ITTS News Meeting – July 20, 2010

1. New CMS vendor selection (Louise)

   Will email a survey link to the folks who attended to get detailed feedback
   Asked for feedback about the first vendor meeting on Monday
   Next vendor is scheduled to come in on Thursday
   Hope to make an announcement sometime after August 1 so the lawyers can start on the contract

2. ALA Connect (Jenny)

   Recent enhancements to Connect include:
   – Rotating banners on the home page to help highlight all of the new features and changes
   – You can now compare versions of online docs to see what actually changed (the way you can on wikis or on new press releases). Just go to the “revisions” tab on an online doc, select which two versions you want to compare, and click on the “show diff” button.
   – In the email notifications for updates to online docs, we’ve added a line that links you directly to the revisions page so that you can immediately go see what’s changed.
   – Right now we’re working on implementing HTML formatting in email notifications in order to make them more legible. We know it’s difficult to read blocks of unformatted text, so we hope to make this easier.
   – In the last two weeks, three new versions of the chat module have been released, so we’re currently testing the latest one to see if we can go live with it to try to resolve the problems that some users encounter when using the chat function. We’ll report back on the testing soon but even if it’s successful, we believe the links to past chats will still be broken, so we’ll again have to give folks time to archive their chats before implementing the new version on the live site. More news on the blog as we have it.

   MemberFuse pilot restarting
   This is the project to test some software called MemberFuse to see if it’s a potential replacement for Drupal to run Connect. Although we got some good feedback from a handful of folks in late May and early June, things kind of died off as we got into Annual. We’re going to add a few more testers and restart the pilot so that it runs July 26 – August 15. If any staff person wants totry it out and give us feedback, please contact Jenny to get access.

3. WEB report (Louise)

   Inventory project
   inventorying each unit’s pages and deleting unneccesary ones
   took three weekends to finish the inventory of each unit’s content
   only removed content that had already been removed from the website by someone in the unit, so no live pages should have disappeared
   we removed 20,000 pages, so we hope that will help with deploys since we’re not trying to publish thousands of removed pages anymore
   HTML Tidy project
   we had a version customized for us to remove font tags, inline formatting, and non-XHTML compliant code, as well as alert us to other accessibility issues
   we have to take files from the website, run them through HTML Tidy, and then return them to Collage
   we’ll be starting to run the program on unit’s files but will coordinate with each unit because we have to lock out authors during the run so that the files don’t change
   units will receive a before and after “snapshot” of the changes to show the differences
   it took Rebecca less than a minute to make most of the changes suggested for the Library’s pages

   question: what are the options for loading new CSS files in Collage for migrating tables?
   answer: we can figure out a way to add the necessary code, hopefully as a universal solution for everyone

   Louise showed the newish Online Learning section of the website since it’s gone live since our last meeting
   we’ll be adding Round Tables as contributors
   trying to get all units to use the templates for uniform display of information

   Louise also showed the revamped Conferences & Events section of the website
   work was done to condense the “calendar of events” area down to three: affiliates & chapters, American Libraries Magazine’s, and a new list of celebration/promotional weeks/days

4. Moodle upgrade to 1.9.8 (Rob)

   happening on Wednesday, July 21, around 5:30pm
   the current content will be copied onto a brand new server using the latest version of Moodle
   classes.ala.org may be down for up to 4 hours while the DNS propagates
   there don’t seem to be any interface changes, although there are a lot of new report options available for instructors; most folks shouldn’t notice any change at all.
   we’ve posted an announcement on the Moodle site for the last week and did a post on the ITTS blog last week

5. Knowledge Management System (Sherri)

   ITTS has worked with the Library to add “expertise” and staff photos to the staff directory in the KM system
   Sheila is working on documentation for how staff can add information to both; it should be ready in mid-August
   all you need is a square image of yourself to add your picture
   Karen showed how to use the expertise directory to find who in the building is a notary public, just as an examlpe

6. Dreamhost Application Migration (Tim)

   we’re migrating from a single, private server on Dreamhost to two new private servers on Dreamhost
   why now?
   because we have some intrusions on our current server that are serving up pharmaceutical ads
   this happened because we have a lot of blog and wiki software on Dreamhost that is very out-of-date
   going forward, we’ll be upgrading all blog and wiki software at once as soon as new versions become available
   the main issue will be that if you have a custom theme for your site (in other words, you’ve changed a default one in some way), you may have to re-install it after the upgrade
   unfortunately, whole domains will have to be moved at the same time (eg, pio.ala.org, alcts.ala.org, etc.), so Rob will work with each unit to coordinate timing
   for content you don’t need anymore, ITTS can archive it on a DVD, although that will just be the data and not necessarily a way to easily view it; we’re investigating options for this.
   if you want to make a site an online archive, we can migrate it and make it uneditable so that it can’t be spammed
   we’ll also be increasing security, like requiring secure FTP, changing everyone’s passwords, and encouraging strong password use
   on the plus side, the new servers will run much faster and perform better

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