So, if you are a speaker at the ALA 2009 Annual Conference in Chicago, this is *the* place for you to upload your handouts, or to publish links to your material, if it is resident on another site. Posting materials prior to conference ensures immediate access by attendees — waiting until after the conference means missing a valuable opportunity to share their knowledge and insights.

Go green! Post your handouts to the wiki before the conference–and you don’t have to make paper copies!  Just  note their availability during your presentation (add “view or download more information at http://presentations.ala.org/” to your last .ppt slide, for example).  This does work–the SLA conference has been largely paper-less for two years now.

Unlike last year, the wiki is not pre-loaded with program titles, but it is organized by day/time. When you add your program, please be sure to include the full text of the listing as in the final program, especially including unit acronyms(!). Full instructions on using the wiki, including the attribution license, and a suggested convention for organizing materials and links, appears on the wiki.

If you will not be with us in Chicago (still time to change your mind!) or if you have one of those inevitable conflicts, know that there is now a place to find the conference material, this year and into the future.

Please also know that you can always contact the ALA Library (library@ala.org) for assistance with locating more about a particular program.

Karen Muller, ALA Librarian

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.

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.

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

• 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!

In between reference calls and staff questions, I’ve been paging through the program.

First, I checked that the program being planned by the committee I’m staff liaison to is there and accurate. It is (p. 79 … top of middle column). And it’s even in the right program track (on p. 41).

Then I noticed that there, on the inside of the back cover, is a short planning calendar–and better yet, a blank page facing it. The planning calendar was a feature of the preliminary programs when I first started attending annual conference, long before joining the ALA staff. And I’ve missed them. Yes, I have created them in any number of planning tools, but this one is immediately available as I page through the booklet. Handy place to note what catches my eye now so I can see if I can shoehorn in an extra or two, once I know the schedule for what I must do.

I looked at the field trips being offered by Camp ALA. Because the conference is in Chicago, I probably won’t be using Camp ALA this year, for the first time in years. If you are thinking of making your trip to conference a family vacation, know that kids enjoy Camp ALA and that the staff are wonderful and caring. Good destinations for the field trips, too.

What else?

• A great line-up of speakers between the division presidents’ programs (p. 10) and the Auditorium Speakers Series (p. 3) including several of my favorite authors
• 2009 Empowerment Conference for library support staff (p. 52 … good speakers … I’ll see if Val and Jessica would like to go)
• Scholarship Bash at the AIC on Saturday, Book Cart Drill Teams on Sunday … starting to look like I should get the kids exhibit passes, which reminds me that one of the nice things about an ALA conference is that it is family friendly
• Theme for the Membership Meetings: Libraries in Hard Times (p. 48)
• Forty (!!) pages of program listings … though some are awards receptions and special dinners and events, including the FRTF 40th Anniversary Gala … these will take more time to sift through. Some catch words: disaster preparedness, metadata, information literacy, influencing legislators, planning, partnerships … surely there’s something for everyone.

Yes, plenty of reasons to make me eager to attend, even after decades of “going to ALA”!!

Karen