ITTS Update

The lease on about one-third of our desktop PCs and laptops will expire in June. We are working on a plan to roll out this new equipment. We are also planning a couple of days when people who use laptops will have a hands-on opportunity to test and select the model of laptop they would like to have.

Urchin has been installed, and website usage statistics for all of 2006 are currently available. Users are encouraged to play with the new service while we develop training materials. Visit http://alalog.ala.org:9999/ and use "testing" (without quotes) for both the login and password.

The usability assessment (UA) was completed in November and a retreat to discuss the results and determine next steps was held in December. We have since contracted with UserWorks for completion of several of the recommendations from the UA, including a card sort and terminology prioritization exercise, as well as a rough draft of an information architecture for the site. Wireframes will debut at Annual Conference in Washington, DC, this summer. A longer-term proposal for a complete redesign of the website is being reviewed. The Web Editorial Board has also created three cross-unit working groups to work on high-priority improvements to the current site, such as Education and Careers, getting involved in ALA, and Awards and Scholarships. A week-long web clean-up project is being planned for April. The group is also working on implementing a new "skin" for the ALA home page to resolve an issue with weekly spotlights falling "below the fold."

Our managed services provider, Valcom, is picking up work on the conversion scripts to move our discussion lists from ListProc to Sympa. We have placed greater priority on this project, as moving to Sympa will significantly improve our mail volume issues. Sympa handles error messages much more efficiently than ListProc does.

The Knowledge Management System was upgraded in January. Users no longer need to provide their context in order to log in. The next phase of development will include system-wide search capability, expanded browse capabilities, the ability to register for training via the KMS, and the new request/response system (aka Feedback Form). Disaster recovery call trees will also be included.

ITTS and Library staff met with SydneyPLUS staff in January to look at a prototype of this application to accept and route incoming requests and track responses. Work continues.

An Online Communities Enhancements wiki has been established to seek ideas for improving the application. It is located at http://wikis.ala.org/ocenhancements/index.php/
Please add your comments!

This application is now available for all units to use. At this point, ALCTS, ACRL, LAMA, LITA and ASCLA are all using the application for their appointments processes. Units interested in customizing the application for their appointments should contact the help desk.

The ALA Library and LITA have joined AL Online in the new CMS (Serena Collage). PLA and AASL are expected to complete their conversions shortly. We anticipate the delivery of our new content services switch any day, which will allow us to move ACRL into Collage as well.

"Read Write Connect," the compendium wiki of ALA blogs, wikis, Flickr, and other interactive web applications, has been well received. We are currently hosting 35 blogs and 49 wikis on ALA servers. We are looking into the possibility of outsourcing the hosting of blogs and wikis to reduce maintenance and support, as well as to simplify the creation of new blogs and wikis, to expand offerings, and to provide more customization capability to blog and wiki managers. Stay tuned.

We have been experiencing problems with our mail server lately, due in large part to heavy demand. A lot of this demand is spam, sadly. When we try to reduce spam by modifying our spam filtering, we bog down the mail server even further. We have not lost any mail, but we have experienced some significant delays. To rectify these problems, we are looking at a number of options. One option is to outsource some of our mail services. Another is to reduce the load on the current server by moving some services (discussion lists, for example) to other servers. We are developing a plan for these possible migrations and will have more information shortly.