All offices of the American Library Association will be closed Thursday and Friday, November 27 and 28, for the Thanksgiving Holiday.
Regular hours (M-F, 8:30-4:30 Central Time for Chicago, and 8:30-4:30 Eastern Time for Washington Office and Choice) will resume on December 1.
Earlier this year, we did a count of the number of blogs and wikis various units of ALA had established, learning that there were well over 100 wikis. The older of the wikis were initially established on an in-house server, whose resources are shared with other key systems functions. The newer wikis have been established on off-site servers.
Starting next week, staff in our IT unit will be migrating all wikis currently hosted at wikis.ala.org to the off site resources. This is being done for two important reasons:
1) To increase stability and availability. As noted, the in-house server cannot support running multiple services on an ongoing basis, and recent wiki downtimes we’ve experienced are the proof.
2) To allow us to upgrade each wiki to the newest version of Mediawiki, which in turn will allow implementation of security measures to minimize spam and allow other enhancements, such as uploading more kinds of files.
For the next few weeks, between 6 and 10 wikis will be transferred. The wiki owners will be notified in advance. During the time of its transfer, each wiki will be out of service for an afternoon. Each wiki will receive a new URL, in the pattern of http://wikis.ala.org/[yourwiki] becoming http://[yourunit].ala.org/[yourwiki], with, for example, http://wikis.ala.org/professionaltips becoming http://info.ala.org/professionaltips. There will be a redirect at the old wiki’s root directory to the new wiki location, but any bookmarks of sub-pages within the wiki will *not* continue to function. Mediawiki is just not built for that. Alas! more broken links!
To see a listing of some of ALA’s wikis, visit ReadWriteConnect, itself a wiki that will migrate ….
The City of Chicago has made numerous adjustments to traffic patterns and public transit schedules to accommodate the anticipated 1 million attendees at the Grant Park rally planned by Democratic candidate Barack Obama. Although the official start of the rally is 8:30 p.m., many downtown offices are closing at 3 p.m. to allow employees to avoid (or join) the crowds. The ALA Chicago office will close at 3 p.m. Tuesday, November 4, reopening at the usual time of 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday.