After a grueling winter, spring finally arrived in Chicago this week! And it arrived just in time for the psychological starting point of summer: Memorial Day.
We and our colleagues in the ALA offices in Connecticut (Choice), Pennsylvania (ALTAFF), and DC (Washington Office) will be enjoying a holiday, Memorial Day on May 25, with all ALA offices closed. All offices will reopen at 8:30 a.m. local time on May 26.
When we launched the current version of the ALA website (www.ala.org) last fall, we stressed that there would be ongoing usability assessment followed by reworkings to the site, both minor and visible, from time to time.
A few months ago we moved all of the offices that had been in “hqops” to the directory with the other offices, so that all would be accessible in the same way. We’ve added additional links–notably to @ your library and the Legislative Action Center (”Take Action”) to the “Related” drop-down on the tool bar. Four divisions (AASL, ACRL, PLA, and RUSA) have redesigned their sections of the site, using many of the same usability techniques as on the main site.
Changes like these are consistent with current thinking on website redesign–see “The Quiet Death of a Major Relaunch,” by Jared M. Spool for some discussion. We conduct user surveys, do card sorts, and hold focus group sessions at ALA’s semiannual conferences to evaluate our needs and decisions. Which is to say: The ALA website will continually evolve. It’s not just that new material will be added; it’s also that dated material will be removed and archived, confusing navigation will be reworked, and sometimes whole sections redone.
At launch we had a “Professional Resources” area, which was a set of “tagged” pages gathering material from around the site into several broad librarianship categories (Collections, Type of Library, etc.). These pages simply were not working as intended. So, the whole area has been reworked, consolidating the topical tagged pages into a “Topics A-Z.”
These, of course, are not every topic of interest to librarians, or those interested in libraries, but the ones that show up in our search logs, our reference inquiry logs, headings in the ALA Editions catalog, etc. Some topics are simply links to the main area of the site for that topic, such as Advocacy; some topics link to specific page, such as Mailing Lists; and others pages with explanatory text and annotated links to relevant materials.
There are more changes in the works … watch for them!
Karen
Last month, I highlighted some early statistics about ALA Connect, and while I would hardly call the middle of May “late,” I thought I’d post an update on those numbers. We won’t keep loading up your stream with Connect statistics, although we do hope to see usage increase leading up to, and after, ALA Annual Conference in July. Until then, here are some aggregate figures for the site’s first five weeks.
There’s also been a lively discussion about Connect on the ALA Council mailing list for the last few days. If you’re interested in reading some councilors thoughts on using (or not using) Connect, go to the May 2009 archive and start with May 8 (09/05/08 in the list).
Some other views of Connect: ALA Connect: The Mother Ship Evolves from School Library Journal and Why We Should Adopt ALAConnect: A brief review and rumination on ALA’s new online community from In the Library with the Lead Pipe.
The ItLwtLP site also has an interesting post from October 15, 2008, titled On the ALA Membership Pyramid. It has 43 comments on it, which contain some truly interesting ideas for ALA. If you’re one of the 2,000+ people who has logged in to Connect, I’m curious to know if you think it can fulfill some of the points made in the comments? It can’t solve all of them, but how can we take the advice from both ItLwtLP posts to make Connect work for those “level 1″ members who aren’t part of committees and who aren’t able to/don’t want to come to conferences?