Online Doc 2009 Annual ITTS Report to WAC

ALA Web Related

6.1 ALA Connect Launch, Stats & Next Phase

The positive feedback about ALA Connect that we received during the beta testing and soft launch phases continued when the site officially launched on April 6. Usage has continued to increase, with a visible spike in traffic on June 16, when an email announcement was sent to ALA members.

While most of the content going into the site is not visible to most users because it's not marked "public," some groups within the Association have clearly adopted Connect for collaborative work and are very active loading files, taking votes, and discussing their work. See the statistics posted on the Marginalia blog for specifics (http://discuss.ala.org/marginalia/2009/06/17/ala-connect-update-and-schedule/).

In addition, members and staff have created more than 80 communities for a variety of purposes. Building a flexible infrastructure that allows various groups to use pieces of Connect however they need to seems to have crystallized members' desire to form communities that cross traditional ALA hierarchical boundaries such as subject, division, and geography.

ALA ITTS is handling support for Connect via email, a "contact us" form on the site, and a Twitter account (http://twitter.com/alaconnect). The site currently runs on Drupal 5, but we're already beginning a beta test of the site in Drupal 6, with plans to migrate after Annual Conference ends. Once this task is completed, the following projects will be implemented through the end of 2009.

• End of July: Mentoring Network
• August: Opportunities Exchange (grants, fellowships, awards, volunteer opportunities, etc.)
• September-October: New search engine (SOLR module)
• October-December: New event planner for Midwinter 2010

Some unintended (but welcome) uses of Connect so far include:

• Alumni groups from various LIS programs are forming ALA Connect communities.
• Ethnic caucuses are forming communities in ALA Connect.
• Communities are forming to discuss the ALA they want to see in the future.
• Communities are forming around LIS education, including a specific course that is open to anyone, including industry vendors and participants who are not registered for the class.
• Informal working groups are creating working spaces in Connect for their projects.
• ALA affiliates are creating communities for their members and even their boards.

In addition, a few groups are using Connect to make ALA more transparent and open, either to members or in general. Examples include:

• The LITA Program Planning Committee, which has opened a public comment thread so that anyone can ask them a question, rather than having to go through liaison channels (http://connect.ala.org/node/76487).
• A "Virtual Participation Resources" community has formed, and the LITA E-participation Task Force has publicly loaded a decision tree (http://connect.ala.org/node/75938) to help other groups integrate online participation in meetings.
• YALSA is holding online chats for its members with its president in ALA Connect.

We've also started an "Improving ALA Connect" community at http://connect.ala.org/node/75799 for soliciting feedback and suggestions on an ongoing basis.

Finally, ITTS would like to formally thank Emerging Leaders Team I for their hard work to produce promotional screencasts for Connect. See Section 6.15 for further information about their project, but their efforts will be invaluable in helping new users in Connect, especially leading into Annual Conference. Team I members are Melissa Dessent, Ahniwa Ferrari, Jaime Hammond, Jennifer Jarson, and Jason Kucsma. Special thanks to WAC Chair Michael Stephens for assisting as their Mentor and Champion.

6.2 Changes to IA & Internship Projects

The ALA 2010 grants have funded one full and one part time internship in Information Architecture & Usability this summer. The interns will perform as many content inventories and analyses of the ALA office materials as time allows, and as needed, will reorganize, add left navigation, convert PDFs to web pages and perform other maintenance. Jan Carmichael, a recent graduate of the University of Illinois, and Dana Muvceski, a student there, were selected from a pool of applicants from across the nation.

6.3 Division Site Harmonization Project & Division Web Content Managers

At midwinter, RUSA and PLA had gone live with redesigned sites. They have since been joined by AASL, ACRL, ASCLA and LLAMA. ALTAFF will be launching a redesign soon. ALCTS is working on a redesign, as are LITA and YALSA. ALSC also intends to redesign its site.

The division lead web managers now meet monthly with Louise Gruenberg to cover materials relevant to their tasks.

6.4 Web Editorial Board Priorities & Liaising

Web Editorial Board now meets as one group, every two weeks. Its priorities include the selection of homepage highlights, review of proposed changes to the site's information architecture, and the promotion of appropriate pod installations as cross-references. We would like to propose the formalization of a liaising relationship between the two entities, so tht there's an established channel for queries and information transfer between WEB and WAC, as needed.

6.5 Collage & CMS Task Force Report

The CMS Task Force now has a community established for it in Connect. Louise Gruenberg is preparing a draft RFP, incorporating feedback from the group. We are scheduling a meeting at annual at a time when most members of the group can participate.

6.6 Google Search Appliance Upgrade

ITTS will be upgrading our Google Search Appliance in July to the most recent software verion – 6.0. This upgrade is not expected to incur downtime, as we will be able to use our backup appliance to process searches while the main appliance is unavailable. The upgrade to 6.0 promises a range of new features, including Query suggestions, Index Migration, new network and system performance diagnostic tools, and automated Index replication across two search appliances for higher availability.

6.7 Committee Appointments Application

The Committee Appointment Application Enhancements project is to add features and make improvements to last year’s highly successful launch of the system. The system allows members to apply for committees, for leaders to appoint members and staff to oversee the process. Improvements and additions to the system will allow for increased reporting for staff and volunteers; additional enhancements are currently being discussed and planned for.

6.8 Awards Database Progress

Rebecca Gerber, ALA Library Reference Librarian, has been shepherding this project through the design phases and into the creation of the back-end database. Preliminary user testing with staff took place the week of June 8th, and changes are being implemented. The search interface will not be ready by Annual, so testing with member-volunteers will take place at ALA when it is ready.

6.9 E-Petition Form

The ePetition application was started as a directive by the ALA board. Traditionally members used paper to gather signatures manually to petition for leadership positions or to propose a charge. This application presents a method to do so electronically on ALA’s website. During initial the design specification gathering, it was decided to extend this system from ALA to the divisions. This new flexibility required the ability to handle many different petition types and eligibility rules beyond those needed for election and charge petitions. A management tool for staff was created to set parameters for members in creating petitions. It also includes enhanced reporting capabilities. The new system will allow members to create new petitions and sign existing petitions online based on their current membership(s).

The ePetition system is currently in the final testing phase and reports are being designed for staff in preparation for launch at the beginning of next fiscal year.

6.10 Sympa Upgrade

The final, stable version of Sympa 6.0 is set for release on June 30th. We are in the process of planning an upgrade from our current Sympa version, 5.3.4. Sympa 6.0 has features designed to make the service scale better and perform better in a large, high-usage environment. It also promises a nicer looking, more intuitive web interface. This upgrade will involve some scheduled down time of the Sympa service, likely about a day including catching up with messages that will queue during the upgrade process.

6.11 ALA Web Style Guide

The Web Style Guide is up at http://techsupport.ala.org/index.php?title=ALA_Web_Style_Guide. In the next fiscal year the accessibility information will be updated to reflect WCAG 2.0.

6.12 Second Life Activities 

ALA has had a strong season, including support of the Virtual Communities & Libraries Member Initiative Group (VCL-MIG) meeting at Midwinter 09 with inworld presentations watched by people at the meeting in Denver. We supplied daily copies of CogNotes to residents via thincBooks and had a display for New York Times/Carnegie Foundation Librarian of the Year Award Winners. Since many awards presentations are part of MW, we created a cross-country ski course that wove past monoliths displaying various book award medals and seals. We also rebroadcast the Youth Media Awards on the main stage for the rest of January. We had a Twitter Screen subscribed to the MW Twitter account to present the tweets to people inworld. It has since run into technical difficulties and lack of support by the creator of the gadget made it necessary for Donavan Vicha to remove it in February. We have other technologies that continue to develop and hope that the developer for our CogHUDs and EventBoards will implement its own version of Twitter soon.

The ALA Island Twitter account grew from 60-odd followers in late May to 376 followers as of the middle of June. The ALA Island Facebook Fan Page now has 221 fans, and the RSS feed for the ALA Island Virtual Presence Blog was fixed, helping to increase its visibility. ITTS is grateful for the contributions of Valerie Hawkins, ALA Library Reference Assistant, in creating and maintaining many of these resources, and in particular for her creative use of social networking tools to expand the visibility of ALA Island.

National Library Week also continues to be a strong event for the island. We linked up with a number of library sims to follow the theme of Worlds Connect, promoting meetings and programs beyond the border of ALA Island, while providing well-attended programs within our borders. Regular meetings and programs are held by members of ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), AASL, and ACRL. We are working with a new staffer for the Washington Office, OITP, to reestablish their presence in Second Life. There are 21 groups in SL that have "Librarian" in their name: VCL-MIG group has 119 members, Librarians of Second Life has 1361, ACRL in Second Life has 74, and Rural Libraries has 57 members, to mention a few. Three groups have formed in ALA Connect that are related to SL activities: VCL-MIG, ACRL Second Life Task Force, and Second Life Users Group on ALA Connect. An ALA Island Library Showcase article, written by Valerie Hawkins appeared on the I Love Libraries website and was reprinted in RezLibris Magazine.

6.13 Web Services Health Check

The objective of this project was to diagnose and recommend remedies to address sporadic reports of web services that become either unavailable or extremely slow.

The areas the health check considered were:

• applications in use
• hardware
• network issues
• some review of customized code pages
• database configuration and access

The deliverable was a report of findings and recommendations detailing performance and configuration remedies, including documentation of the current configuration and proposed modifications.

Nine companies responded to our RFP to perform the Web Services Health Check. Pathfinder Development (http://www.pathf.com/) was chosen to do the work. The report was delivered on May, 22, 2009. Over the course of the health check many issues and problems were identified, and many recommendations were made.

Below are the recommendations that we feel are critical and need to be acted upon in the short term.

1. Deploy caching software such as Varnish on the Apache web servers to improve site performance and stability.
2. Move the database servers to a dedicated protected segment of the internet facing network (DMZ network), and create rules to allow the Web/application servers to only access the database servers on the database service. All other traffic should be denied.
3. Implement use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution to enhance secure access to the ALA network. Our Cisco 5520 does have VPN capabilities, but other VPN solutions may be more suitable depending on ALA’s needs.
4. Build a new server based on Windows Server 2008 and SQL Database Server 2008 (some applications will not run on SQL Server 2008; we may use SQL Server 2005) and migrate all databases to it. Using SQL Server 2005 or 2008 will also allow easy replication of the databases for high availability and performance.
5. Create a Source Version Control repository of all application code and all other web assets (HTML pages, service configurations, etc). The Collage web content management system currently serves as a source control for the website content only.
6. ALA may wish to have a full penetration assessment performed so they have a clear picture of what risks they face.
7. Consider whether the high risks regarding PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance outweigh the benefits of handling credit card transactions internally versus outsourcing this function to a 3rd party. If so, out source the credit card handling functionality currently done internally to an external service provider. Some examples of 3rd party credit card handling service providers can be found on this site.
8. Implement server virtualization to improve performance, reliability, disaster recovery, and lower the cost of ownership to ALA.

ITTS is currently addressing security issues identified in the report. We are also moving forward with item number one, four, and eight above, and are in the planning phase for items two and five.

Ongoing & Upcoming Projects

6.14 Usability Tests at Annual

Seven division websites (AASL, ACRL, ALSC, LITA, PLA, RUSA, and YALSA) will undergo user testing at annual. Testing will include access to some common ALA forms, such as committee volunteering and member renewal.

ALA Connect will also be tested. The awards database testing will take place at ALA after Annual, since the project will not be ready in time.

6.15 Emerging Leaders Projects

Team D

Thanks to Susan Franklin, Beth Larkee, Zeth Lietzau, and Jack Marshall Manness, the ALA members of Emerging Leaders, Team D. “ALA Emerging Leaders Team D attended Midwinter focus groups with NMRT and Council members, reviewed consultant reports of the focus groups, and analyzed results of previous surveys to construct a post-redesign survey of these groups. Team D tailored questions to the most pressing issues raised in these previous instruments, focusing on the interactivity of the site and the consistency of browsing options among Office, Round Table, Committee and Division pages. Team D also asked questions about what information these users are seeking in using ala.org, how they seek it, and how difficult it is to find. Because alaconnect may address some of the interactivity needs of respondents, the survey also asked how familiar respondents were with the service. Initial results suggest that while there are indeed different information needs and seeking behaviors between these two groups and among users of various ages, both desire more interactivity from the site, which alaconnect may provide at least in part, and more importantly, that greater consistency of browsing options is both desired and could perhaps address users’ difficulty in finding information on ala.org. Team D will present additional quantitative survey findings at Annual, and will also provide ‘web design personas’ that ITTS and WAC can use to personify their users and make user-centered and empathetic design decisions as usability efforts continue.” --from Team D

 Team I

"After an initial meeting at ALA Midwinter, Team I reviewed the Project Roadmap for ALA Connect to determine how our group could make a substantial and useful contribution to the launch of ALA Connect. We decided to create a series of screencasts intended to promote the site by highlighting key features and how users might take advantage of them.

We established a working plan and created the following screencasts, which will be available before Annual on ALA Connect, AL Focus, Blip.tv, YouTube, and Vimeo:

• ALA Connect Promotional Video
• Dog-Loving Librarians Who Knit and Watch Lost: Creating Communities in ALA Connect
• Why Connect Over My Other Social Networking Tools?
• Finding People on ALA Connect
• Manage Your ALA Commitments
• Collaborative Document Editing with Other Members
• What's New with Other Groups?
• Here's What's New with My Group!
• Finding New Groups that Might Interest You
• Keeping Up with ALA Connect: What's Going on?
• ALA Connect for LIS Students
• ALA Connect for Non-ALA Members"-- from Team I

6.16 Accessibility/XML Clean-Up

Funding for FY 2010 will make a code cleanup initiative possible. This will automatically remove font tags and other formatting that overrides the style sheet and alert us to pages containing tables that do not meet accessibility guidelines.

6.17 Form Interaction Design & Upgrades

Funding for FY 2010 will make it possible to review and improve common ALA web forms, such as the renew, join, rejoin and add functions.

6.18 Website Collection Standards Development

The subcommittee for this action item has not met, and a staff attempt to seek 2010 grant funding to explore archiving issues for the association at large was not funded. With the launch of ALA Connect, it would be very helpful if WAC could provide leadership in the form of guidelines or actual policies to staff and member-volunteer web editors. The guidelines should clarify where it is appropriate for certain types of information to be displayed. For example, committee minutes and draft documents should be located in ALA Connect, rather than on ala.org, while the committee should have a committee landing page on ala.org that includes the RSS feed from Connect. WAC could also establish best practices retention periods for press releases, press kits, events and other time sensitive items whose links are not maintained over time, including suggestions for what types of items should simply be deleted, and which should be digitally archived , away from the website. We propose that WAC work with liaison(s) from the Web Editorial Board to develop a draft document to present to WAC at Midwinter, for eventual adoption by the association. If WAC agrees, a web survey of members could help determine what members want done.

6.19 Online Handbook of Organization

This project is going forward under the direction of Karen Muller, ALA Library Director, and ITTS' Louise Gruenberg and Sheila Joy. ITTS is developing a standardized committee template that will include a roster link that displays full contact information only to ALA members, and an RSS feed from the committee's page in ALA Connect to display any public posts.

6.20 Online Surveys

Google Analytics indicate that the average visitor visits 3.12 pages and spends less than three minutes (2:39 ) on the site. In the coming fiscal year, ITTS would like to plan an exit survey for the website to determine whether visitors found what they wanted, or were able to accomplish what they intended.

6.21 Event Planner Survey Results to Date

Dave Hargett, Rebecca Jackman, Mary Popp, Jean Rainwater, William Reed, and ITTS staff member Jenny Levine

The subcommittee created a community in ALA Connect where it could conduct its work (http://connect.ala.org/node/72662) and collaborated virtually between Midwinter and Annual to create and release a survey to gather feedback about the current Event Planner. The survey went live on June 1 and was publicized through the ITTS Update blog, the AL Direct enewsletter, the ALA Annual Twitter account, and within the current Event Planner.

As of Tuesday, June 23, 224 people had responded to the survey, with 184 of them completing it. In addition, there were regularly 35+ comments on the questions that included open-ended fields for further explanation, so there is a very good range of feedback and suggestions for improvement.

The survey will remain open through July 19, so final figures are not available yet. When the survey closes, a summary will posted in Connect, and the Subcommittee will discuss the feedback and how to use it to design a more usable tool. Implementation of the new event planner is still scheduled for Midwinter 2010.

6.22 Strategic Website Planning Progress

Preliminary objectives have been written, and were discussed by the Web Editorial Board. We would now like WAC to provide member input.

6.23 Recognition for Content Editors

A formal proposal will be presented to WAC by October 1, so that action can be taken at Midwinter.

6.24 New Financial System 

ALA is currently using GEAC SQL Financials, formerly known as Clarus. GEAC discontinued support for Clarus in 2001. Biznet continues to support it, but only on a best effort basis. The FRx financial reporting system no longer supports the version that will run with Clarus. Thus there is no upgrade path and no guaranteed support. Further, GEAC requires MS SQL 7, which will no longer be supported after January 11, 2011. Finance and ITTS have deferred the selection to 2010 and implementation to 2011 due to budgetary constraints.

6.25 Implementation of new Payroll/HR System

Human Resources, ITTS, and the Accounting staff have determined that a move from the current vendor is appropriate to meet current needs. An RFP was re-circulated. Three vendors were selected for demonstrations in December. From the three, Ultimate Software was selected. The new system includes payroll processing, leave tracking, benefits tracking, compensation, and applicant tracking systems. The new system is scheduled to go live in October 2010.