ALA Marginalia » ALA Initiatives

MentorConnect on the Launchpad

Jenny — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:06:29 +0000

Update: MentorConnect is now live – go to your Connect profile and give it a try!

We’re excited to announce that next week, we plan to launch a new service within ALA Connect called MentorConnect. Now that we’ve finished phase one for the site (collaborative work space, profiles with networking, and offering the ability to create communities that live outside of ALA’s hierarchy), we’re focusing on implementing two new services aimed at members who want to get involved professionally, but not necessarily at the committee level.

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!

ALA Connect Update and Schedule

Jenny — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:32:58 +0000

If you’re an ALA member, you should have received an email about ALA Connect yesterday. We’ve been doing PR for the site through other channels (American Libraries, AL Direct, etc.), but this was the first time we’ve directly contacted members. Initial responses have been positive, and according to Google Analytics, we had more than 2,200 people visit the site yesterday alone.

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!

Increasing Usage of ALA Connect

Jenny — Wed, 13 May 2009 15:37:26 +0000

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.

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?

Have You Connect-ed Yet?

Jenny — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:56:42 +0000

Just a quick note to say how happy we are about the response to ALA Connect. We’ve received many positive emails, tweets, and more about the site, but even better – folks are checking it out and using it. This can be difficult to see, as many working groups are not posting their content publicly, but we’re only a couple of weeks into this new endeavor, so we expect content in the working groups and communities will continue to grow, especially going into Annual Conference.

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?

Conversations at ALA

Mary — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:07:47 +0000

Active participation in the conversations that keep an association “live” have a long history at ALA. After all, “conversation” is an association “c” — along with continuity, context and community. There are approximately 5,000 people in “official” committee and board positions (i.e. listed in the ALA Handbook of Organization). That’s a good number — but there are more, many more, involved in discussion groups and interest groups (both face-to-face and electronic). Over the last few years, ALA “participation” has become increasingly varied and diverse.

Preparing to contribute to a couple of panel discussions on online communities and social networking at DigitalNow, I realized my current sense of the volume of social network and online community activity at ALA was “lots” and “more” — generally correct, but hardly specific. So, I went in search of some data. Here’s what I found — and it represents an impressive contribution from both members and staff. As of about April 22, 2008, ALA’s “footprint” in the worlds of social networking and online communities looked like this:

There were 2,671 participants in ALA’s Facebook group as of April 18 — with about 15 more joining the group every day. Four divisions and four round tables had groups in Facebook. There are ALA Students Chapters in Facebook, as is the Office for Intellectual Freedom. The Freedom to Read Foundation has a group in Facebook — with 146 members after one month — and is beginning to raise money in Facebook.

In Second Life, ALA’s National Library Week 2008 events attracted 2800 visits from around the globe (plus staff visits). ALA president Loriene Roy spoke in Second Life. AASL’s Doug Johnson gave a presentation, as did Jenny Levine (on gaming in libraries). YALSA streamed podcasts. The many contributions of Lori Bell (Alliance Library System) to ALA in Second Life were recognized. After the Banned Books Week events in Second Life, ALA had 89 people in its ALA SL Notification group; that number is now 245. (And there’s also an ALA Member Initiative Group: Virtual Communities and Libraries — which held its first face-to-face meeting at the Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia.) To teleport to the ALA Island/ALA Main Stage, go to: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ALA%20Island/128/107/29/ . Also, Valerie Hawkins in the ALA Library has prepared an extensive guide to SL, at http://wikis.ala.org/professionaltips/index.php/Second_Life .

On Ning, current statistics show 357 members (most, but not all, ALA members) in an ALA-labeled group in Ning. See http://alamembers.ning.com . YALSA also has a Ning site for student members. There are other library-related, but not ALA-specific, groups in Ning, too — e.g. Second Life Librarians.

About a year ago, I asked how many blogs and wikis had been developed in “ALA space.” The answer then? More than 30 of each — and growing. The answer now? There are 70 blogs and 125 wikis that we know of — and still growing. Most of these can be accessed through the ReadWriteConnect link on the ALA home page.

Looking at “old” social networking technology, ALA has 948 active email discussion lists on Sympa (1095, counting inactive lists with available archives). There is no up-to-date count on the number of ALA email lists (lists using the name of ALA or one of its component groups) on external servers, such as campus servers. How many people participate on those lists? That, I don’t know — but we’ll add it to the list of “counting” tasks.

Several years ago, ALA implemented an Online Communities platform using DotNetNuke. There are 281 “online communities” currently. Implementation of a range of new online community/social networking features (”ALA Connect”) using Drupal, an open source platform, is underway — but that’s a future post.

Looking at social media, American Libraries‘ series of short videos for National Library Week 2008 received 78,400 views. The single most popular video in the series (The Reference Desk) received 23,530 views. These statistics do not include the views through various external blogs and websites in which they were embedded. We have no count on embeds. Comments appeared on AL Focus, Blip and YouTube. In case you missed them, catch the fun at http://alfocus.ala.org/categories/national-library-week and http://youtube.com/AmLibraryAssociation .

There are other indicators of the changes in the conversational mix. At the 2007 Annual Conference, a LITA Interest Group (BIGWIG) held an “unconference,” using a variety of social networking tools, including Twitter. As of last week, there were 45 people signed up to follow the 2008 Annual Conference on Twitter (http://twitter.com/alaannual) — and there’s a short thread there from the 2007 Annual Conference. YALSA is also on Twitter.

ALA has a 100-seat (divisible) classroom/meeting room in OPAL, an online meeting/conferencing facility for libraries, which uses a blend of VOIP and text chat. ALA president-elect Jim Rettig has met with his advisory committee in OPAL. Units can reserve space through staff in Outlook.

I know there’s more — and still more coming. If I take another “snapshot” a year from now, how much will have changed? I’m not sure I know how it will have changed — or how much — but I’m sure I’ll see change and that the path will not have been boring.

Thanks to ALA staff colleagues Matt Ivaliotes, Donavan Vicha, Tina Coleman, John Chrastka, Jenny Levine, Don Wood and Beth Yoke who did the counting and provided all the information.

NLW Videos Available to Libraries

Jenny — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:46:32 +0000

AL Focus, the video arm of American Libraries, is in the middle of releasing a string of eight videos promoting National Library Week based on the 2006 Quotable Facts about America’s Libraries brochure. Feel free to point users to them, embed them in your own sites, or re-use the intro on your own videos. Here’s the one on salty snacks and yes, these pretzels are making me thirsty!

Second ALA Life

Jenny — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:02:32 +0000

ALA continues to work with its members and the public to experiment in the virtual world Second Life. We held a party in-world for Banned Books Week last year, and this year some very knowledgeable students in San Jose State University’s School of Library and Information Science helped rebuild our island. We went from a fairly static, sectioned presence to a more interactive and visually interesting one. There’s a new events area, information about each of our divisions, general information about ALA, some games, and other things to explore.

By the memory game

Book Stage at Sunrise

Besides wanting to publicly thank Jeremy Kemp, Bernd Becker, Daniel Brunk, Susie Quinn, and Robin Williams for all of their great work and SJSU SLIS for giving their time to us, I also want to note that we’ll be advertising SL events soon for National Library Week. In the meantime, please be sure to stop by and play around with some of the more fun things on our island. More to come in the future.

ALALibraryVal Miles poses beside the 2008 National Library Week Kiosk, wearing the free t-shirt available.

ALALibraryVal Miles accesses and wears the free National Library Workers Day t-shirt from the 2008 National Library Week Kiosk