While you may be thinking about MidWinter because it’s just around the corner, we’re thinking about Annual, so the Conference Planning Committee has already started talking about how to improve next year’s virtual Annual. We have a three-year contract with Learning Times, so that will be the platform, but many of the other pieces are up in the air at this point, which makes it a good time to ask for some input.

We can’t promise anything at this point, but what’s your wishlist? There are already some “givens,” but building a structure around them, what would you like to see? Here are just a few of the questions we have, but feel free to give us feedback around other issues, too.

• We can’t do this for free, not if we want to offer a quality, stable video feed. Keep in mind, though, that our members do tend to stream some of the more popular sessions, such as Top Tech Trends, and that will continue. Which sessions are you okay with as volunteer streams versus quality feeds?
• We can’t stream the keynotes because the speakers don’t give us permission, and in fact, they usually forbid it. Otherwise, though, what types of sessions do you want to participate in remotely?
• What does “participate in remotely” mean to you?
• Where are the price points that fit? Are there tiers or does one-size-fits-all work in this type of situation?
• Where can we add value to improve your virtual conference experience? Are you more interested in just sessions, or do you want virtual hallways, networking opportunities, and other comparable experiences, too? If it’s the latter, what do they look like?
• If you’ve seen this done well somewhere else, we’d love to hear about it. Just give us a URL and a description of what you liked about it.

This is your chance to give us input to help shape the future of virtual ALA conferences, so please share your thoughts!

The first of those projects is MentorConnect (”MC”), a service that allows ALA members to create mentoring profiles that highlight their expertise and experience. After they’ve joined MC, any ALA member can search for a mentor using a variety of criteria (gender, type of library, ethnicity, etc.) and request mentorship. Once created, the mentorship is tracked within MC, with a space for providing and archiving feedback. The system will even prompt you every few months to make sure you’re staying in touch.

Here are some screenshots that show some of the features. This first one is an example of a mentee profile. Mentor profiles look pretty much the same.

Once you’ve created a profile, you can then search for a mentor.

MC keeps a record of all of your mentors and mentees, including past ones.

At any time, you can view the feedback for a particular mentorship. When you add new feedback, the other person will get an email notice, and she can log in and reply.

The MentorConnect tab will appear on your profile next week, along with a link to it in the left-hand sidebar. If you don’t like something about MC or if you encounter a problem using it, please let us know. If you do like it, let former ALA President Jim Rettig know, because he funded this initiative during his term. Thanks, Jim! 

So here’s a benchmark for future measurements, because for the first time, we’ll have an archive we can refer back to, at least for Twitter, which was the most heavily used site during the conference. Here’s a summary I wrote for Keith Michael Fiels, ALA’s Executive Director.

—————–
Some numbers:

• Flickr: 4,011 pictures
• A Google Blogsearch says there are about 14,000 posts using the tag ala2009, but that’s not really right  because it includes the Flickr pictures, comments on blogs, etc. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to get an exact count. If I had to guess, I’d say that most of the posts are recaps of someone’s conference experience, followed closely by summaries of sessions, and links to presentation materials (in that order). Some samples:
  • ALA 2009: A Perspective
  • ALA 2009 Wrap-Up (Warning: It’s LONG)
  • Displaced at ALA Annual
  • ALA lesson #2: The Power of Teh Intarwebs
• Twitter: 10,362 tweets using the #ala2009 tag by 1,321 authors (including the ALA Annual account and other ALA units)
  • tweets before: 765
  • tweets thu: 680
  • tweets fri: 1380
  • tweets sat: 2390
  • tweets sun: 2250
  • tweets mon: 1725
  • tweets tue: 589
  • tweets after: 583 (7/15-24/2009, although tweets continue to appear so this number will still increase a little)
  • by tag:
    • #ala2009 – 8517 (this was the main hashtag that we asked people to use)
    • #ala09 – 415
    • #alacouncil – 82
    • #membership – 39
    • #totebag – 265 (an unofficial snark channel)
    • #unala2009 – 450 (the unconference)
    • #acrl101 – 22
    • #ala09_is – 8 (ACRL Instruction Section)
    • #ala2prom – 26 (Library 2.0 session)
    • #lib2.0 – 118 (Library 2.0 session)
    • #ttt2009 – 35 (LITA’s Top Tech Trends)
    • #toptech – 43 (LITA’s Top Tech Trends)
    • #bigwig2009 – 13
    • #clene09 – 10
    • #clenets09 – 6
    • #godort09 – 3
    • #mobile_lib – 50 (WO panel)
    • #rusaht – 6 (RUSA Hot Topics session)
  • The reason I can give you such specific stats about the tweets is that ALA member Heather Devine offered to create an online Flickr/Twitter tracker for the conference a couple of weeks before the event. She finished it just a couple of days before Annual started, having done most of the work while she was on vacation. You can see it still running, and she’s going to give us the code and database so that we can 1) archive it, and 2) implement this for other conferences in the future. I can’t begin to describe how lucky we are that Heather did this, because there’s no good way to archive tweets right now, and we don’t have the resources to create this ourselves. The site got a lot of notice and a lot of hits during Annual, with Roy Tennant in particular noting it. I’d like to request that ALA to send Heather a letter of thanks if possible for this herculean and incredibly valuable effort.
• LJ very smartly did a daily recap of what they considered to be the “best” tweets of the day. Reading through them gives an excellent overview of the conference.
  • Saturday
  • Sunday
  • Monday
  • Eric Hellman did an analysis of the ala2009 hashtag
  • Then there was the interesting, but relatively harmless, appearance of the anonymous alasecrets and alasecrets2009 accounts on Twitter. While they were discussed, retweeted, and linked to online, those tweets didn’t spill over very much into the mainstream hashtag, and in fact, it allowed the really nasty stuff to stay out of the ala2009 space, which was good for us. One media blog picked up on it and noted it in a post, but that was about it. Someone shut down the original alasecrets account when it devolved into sex talk, but others had saved the tweets and posted them on Scribd, and the alasecrets2009 account took over where the first one left off. LJ did an interview with the anonymous originator of both accounts.
• According to Boopsie, more than 1500 people downloaded their ALA2009 application. I’m unclear if this figure includes people like me who accessed it on the web. It garnered a lot of praise online, with a couple of people tweeting that it helped them find a session when they didn’t know where it was.
• There are also a ton of great videos on YouTube from the conference, including several of the book cart drill teams and a wonderful fake fight between Neil Gaiman and James Kennedy for the Newbery Award.
• The staff of American Libraries did their usual, wonderful job covering the conference. See their blog posts on Inside Scoop, videos on AL Focus, and the Post-Conference issue of AL Direct for a full overview of everything that happened at #ala2009.

I know my conference experience was better because of these online components. What was your experience?

So today seems like a good time to do an update on statistics and to talk about Connect’s immediate future a little bit. First, some new, aggregate numbers for April 6 – June 16 (roughly 10 weeks).

• Total # of users who have logged in: 3610 (3196 ALA members + 414 non-ALA members)
• Total # of posts: 406
• Total # of online documents: 265
• Total # of calendar events: 162
• Total # of polls/votes: 25
• Total # of discussions (in forums): 143
• Total # of images: 19
• Total # of comments: 761
• Total # of new communities created: 81

So usage is consistent and steady, and we’re not seeing a major drop-off, which is a good sign. Now that we’ve let everyone know about the site in as direct a way as possible, we’ll continue watching these numbers. The Google Analytics chart below suggests even greater usage since it’s for only an eight-day period.

Now that we feel like we’re through the official launch phase, we’re moving on to the next big thing for Connect. We’re currently migrating from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, and we hope to go live (seamlessly) with the new version after our Annual Conference. Then the “really big plans” kick in.

We’ve worked with ALA President Jim Rettig to implement two exciting  initiatives from his campaign. We plan to integrate a mentoring network by the end of July and an “opportunities exchange” by the end of August (think grants, volunteering, fellowships, awards, etc.). After that, we’ll be implementing a new search engine and then the new conference event planner for Midwinter 2010.

It’s a pretty packed year for Connect, and your feedback will be critical as we implement all of this. Let us know what you think!

As a preview, members can simply use your member ID number to get 10% off at www.booksamillion.com/ala or 20% off at over 220 store locations around the US. Other details for Organizational members will follow soon. And keep your eye on the mail for a special discount card from Books-A-Million, exclusively for ALA members.

We hope that this new benefit program will help you stretch your personal and library budgets. Contact John Chrastka, Director for Membership Development, for more information at jchrastka@ala.org.

• Total # of logins: 2,220 (1,950 ALA members + 270 non-members)
• Total # of posts: 243
• Total # of online documents: 210
• Total # of calendar events: 181
• Total # of polls/votes: 22
• Total # of discussions (in forums): 66
• Total # of images: 29
• Total # of comments: 479
• Total # of member-generated communities: 40

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?

Here are some early numbers from the site’s first two weeks:

• 1588 people have logged in (1395 ALA members + 193 non-ALA members)
• # of new communities created by ALA members and staff: 22
• # of posts: 124 total
• # of online documents: 124 total
• # of calendar events: 125 total
• # of polls/votes: 14 total
• # of discussions: 32 total
• # of images: 24 total

So stuff is happening on the site – what’s happening in your groups?

I won’t go into detail about what Connect is in this post because there’s a lot about it here, including a Roadmap for future development. If you’re the explorer type, you can skip this post altogether and go play for yourself – just head over to http://connect.ala.org and log in using your ALA website username and password. If you’re not sure what those are, you can find them here.

We’ve worked very hard to provide members with a more robust level of privacy options than they’ve ever had before on both sides of the scale. If you want to be more open about displaying your ALA information, you can display your entire profile publicly. This isn’t the default, but if you’re the 2.0 type who wants everyone to know about the great work you do for ALA, you can toggle this option in your profile to display those affiliations publicly.

If you’re the kind of person who’s worried about sharing too much online, we’ve got you covered, too. In the current member directory on the ALA website (which will be going away in the near future), you can’t hide any of your affiliations – everything is there for other members to see. However, in Connect, you can actually opt out of displaying all non-committee affiliations on your profile. You can choose on a group-by-group basis to hide your affiliation with a community, division, round table, or section. For what we hope are fairly obvious reasons, you can’t hide your participation on an official committee. For more information and instructions about how to do this, read the FAQ about Privacy in ALA Connect.

So here’s a quick overview of how privacy works in ALA Connect.

• The public sees only your name.
  
• Other ALA members see your name, institutional affiliation, and ALA affiliations.
  
• You can add more information about yourself, like a short bio, your interests, your job description, links to your blog/Flickrstream/etc., and more. If you don’t fill these things out, though, no expanded information appears on your profile.
• You can choose to display your profile (minus your contact information) to the world. Add it to your signature file, put the link on a resume, or link to it from your blog.
  
• Other ALA members you manually make part of your network see all of the above plus your contact information.

If none of these options appeal to you, you can log in to the ALA website and exclude yourself from the member directory, which will remove you from ALA Connect altogether. Be aware that this means you won’t be able to log in to Connect at all, although this doesn’t affect any other part of your membership or website access.

The exclusion options are also completely separate from your communication preferences, which control how much snail mail and email you receive from ALA. We’ve again tried to err on the side of conservatism while providing members with options, so by default, you won’t receive email from any of your ALA groups unless you log in to Connect and manually turn on email notices. Even better, you can do this on a group-by-group basis. So if you’re on a committee or other official ALA working group, you can turn on email from that group but not from other ones.

So consider this an important heads-up to read about how to set your email preferences in ALA Connect, too.

Please let us know if you have questions about any of this. We’re very excited about this new service and its future!

For example, we learned that at the end of 2008, ALA members have an average of 2.1 participations, which are essentially affiliations with an official ALA group (committees, discussion groups, divisions, events, interest groups, member initiative groups, round tables, and sections). If we narrow down the scope to members who have at least one affiliation, 42,000 members have an average of 3.2 participations.

I’m heartened that the majority of members have more than one affiliation, because I think it means they’ve found at least one small slice of ALA that is relevant to them. Where the numbers get even more interesting is when we look at the full range of participations across all members. Clearly, some people have found quite a few areas of interest to them in ALA.

One of our main goals with ALA Connect is to help members find the other interesting and relevant pieces of the gooey, amorphous cloud that is ALA. Personally, I hope Connect helps those 21,821 members find ways to get more involved (should they want to), because as the person categorizing the more than 1,000 active groups in the Connect subject tree, I can honestly tell you that ALA is so big that it truly does have something for everybody.

ALA Council: Who, What, Why, and How