Archive for July, 2009
July 30th, 2009 by Elin Waagen
Agenda for 8/5 (feel free to edit as needed)
Voter
Carrie and Elin will be away the next 4 meetings
Liz – can you set up projector and laptop?
Meeting notes: Ian
Time Keeper?
Moderator: Liz (dangerous to take a vacation, Liz – you never know what you get volunteered for…)
Any announcements, etc? (5 min)
Identify primary contacts for content(45 min)
Wrap-up, agenda for next meeting etc. (10 min)
Ian and Barbara have volunteered to moderate 1 meeting each; Liz – one more?
Upcoming timeline items:
August
8/3 – Web Makeover Meetings with Primary Contact and Project Manager
8/5 – Complete gathering MOST input (more will trickle in throughout process).
8/10 – Web Makeover Follow-up meetings with Primary Contact and Project Manager – discuss and respond to WW recommendations for IA/Content
Week of 8/17 – Web Makeover – check in – roles and timelines are due
8/17 – Present roles and timelines for LIS at web project managers meeting
8/20 – Proposed recommendations presented to sponsor
Future topics:
Continue brainstorming recommendation
Primary contacts for content
Building coalition
Evaluate information architecture and corresponding list of LIS website contacts for current LIS site
Review permissions list and make recommendations for content providers
Recommendation/proposal for AD’s
Action plan to achieve key deliverables
Analyze survey results and usage data
Finalize measurements/metrics – what does success look like; what metric will define our success?
July 29th, 2009 by Jess Isler
This is a quick and dirty attempt at a survey… Let’s see if we can get feedback from LIS student employees staffing Circulation, Helpdesk, Tech processing, P&P, Stacks, ILL (and at least some representation from branches).
Email intro something like:
Dear student employee,
To go along with the College web makover, we are creating a new LIS website and we would love your feedback on what works, what doesn’t, and what you would like to see on the site.
Please try to answer these questions from your perspective as a student!
- What do you use most often on the LIS website? [we could give options or leave it wide open]
- What features of the LIS website work or could be improved? [same as LIS staff version]
- Is there anything missing from the LIS website?
- Rate your level of comfort with these technologies [same as LIS staff version]
- Is there anything else we should know?
July 29th, 2009 by Elin Waagen
Agenda for 7/30
Lib 221
Liz and Doreen are out
Meeting notes: Carrie
Any announcements, etc? (5 min)
Timeline – other adjustments? (5 min)
Recommendations (40 min)
Wrap-up, agenda for next week etc. (10 min)
Upcoming timeline items:
July
7/30 – Evaluate information architecture and corresponding list of LIS website contacts for current LIS site
August
8/1 – Complete gathering MOST input (more will trickle in throughout process).
8/3 – Web Makeover Meetings with Primary Contact and Project Manager
8/5 – Finalize design criteria
8/10 – Web Makeover Follow-up meetings with Primary Contact and Project Manager – discuss and respond to WW recommendations for IA/Content
Week of 8/17 – Web Makeover – check in – roles and timelines are due
8/17 – Present roles and timelines for LIS at web project managers meeting
8/20 – Proposed recommendations presented to sponsor
Future topics:
Primary contacts for content
Building coalition
Evaluate information architecture and corresponding list of LIS website contacts for current LIS site
Review permissions list and make recommendations for content providers
Recommendation/proposal for AD’s
Action plan to achieve key deliverables
Analyze survey results and usage data
Finalize measurements/metrics – what does success look like; what metric will define our success?
July 29th, 2009 by Alex Chapin
The Educause Live! series has a web seminar on Selecting and Implementing a Course Management System for Your Campus on August 5th from 1-2 pm.
(Thanks Joy for passing on this link)
July 29th, 2009 by Carrie Macfarlane
- Media Lab: Has no stats that would be of use to us
- Reference: Has no stats that would be of use to us, but when I asked Bryan about ref stats he suggested EZProxy stats, so…
- EZProxy: Has no stats that would be of use to us YET. Later, we should consult these. They can tell us about subscription database use, including what databases are most commonly used and how many of our database users log in from on-campus vs off-campus. They can tell us more than that too, but to get more we might need help from someone like Ian! Barbara can explain better than I can. Mike Lynch will be a good resource too. If you want a look, go to: \orgs\LIS\LISstaff\ILS III Millennium User Materials\EZProxy statistics\+START HERE 2009.html
July 29th, 2009 by James Beauchemin
I have begun an attempt to query HEAT for any useful statistics that could aid us in our mission. Since HEAT has a unique way of structuring its data in its semi-relational model it has been challenging to pull helpful information. One primary reason for this is that the important information we would want to know about (e.g. sites, problem/request details, etc…) are in free-text fields which cannot be queried easily. Another obstacle is that there seem to be a variety of methods currently (historically) used to categorize Web Site specific events. I spent a few hours this week getting to know the database structure and I should be able to provide some statistics (qualified) by early next week. If anyone has suggestions on the type of information/stats we could pull please send them my way. For now I will look for the obvious stats and we can drill into HEAT further as we discover more about HEAT’s dB and where the data is stored.
July 28th, 2009 by Joseph Antonioli
The Curricular Technology team is making the following recommendations to LIS on the platforms available for creating course sites. – Alex Chapin
A number of technology tools and services are available to faculty to use in their teaching and for their courses including applications for creating course sites, blogs, collaborative spaces and presentations. What follows are recommendations that focus primarily on platforms for creating course sites over the next academic year. These recommendations take into consideration the recent decision by LIS to decommission Segue and the impact the Web Makeover project will have on available resources and technologies.
(more…)
July 28th, 2009 by Bryan Carson
WordPress Issues
- Can’t upload large files.
- Recommendations: use Segue, classes folders, Docutek.
- cForms inhibits the upgrade in WP.
- Best of breed vision should be followed to alleviate this issue. Make WP be the best blogging platform instead of its being held hostage to data collection feature that has been grafted on.
Recommendations for course websites for fall semester posted to various blogs (including this one).
Discussion about how to gather information from faculty.
- surveys?
- what are your needs?
- not “let’s look at moodle, drupal, etc. and tell us what has the feature set you like.”
- informal conversations?
- Information-gathering strategy? (Joe)
Action Item: Survey.
- Alex will set up in google spreadsheet.
- Think of ways to gather the information
- LIS Advisory Groups?
July 27th, 2009 by Ian McBride
Before I begin with the data, I have to explain for website redirection works. We have a number of pages on the CMS that redirect the user to another page. An example is the link to MIDCAT on the LIS home page. The redirection is done by sending what is called an HTTP Header from the web server to the client. Basically, all web responses from a server come in two parts: the headers, which supply some metadata to the client about their request, and the body, which contains the content. When a server instructs a client to go to another location, via a redirect, it might send a header of type 302 and the location of the new site. The client then makes a request for the new site. Importantly, this is all done before the body of the original site is loaded by the client.
This is important because of the way Google Analytics works. The code to update the analytics data for the site is contained at the end of the body and is only run if the entire page loads. This means that when we do a redirect, the user’s click on that link is not recorded by our analytics tools. Because of this, you will see a 0 next to that link to MIDCAT on the LIS home page. It would be silly of us to assume that this link is never clicked on, but according to GA, it wasn’t. I’ve noted in the spreadsheet at the end of this post whenever a link on a page is a redirect. We could use standard log file analysis to determine the exact number of page visits to all of these, but as I explained earlier, we don’t have the log files because I deleted them all.
This is not to say that we should discount the results of the data here. There is still useful information in GA. However, when looking at the data, we need to take into account that there are links on each page for which we don’t have information.
Now on to the analysis! The following data is for the last year (July 26, 2008 – July 26, 2009). I figured that a full year would give us the most robust view of the site traffic.
I’ll start with the total page views for each major area of the LIS site. Unsurprisingly, the Library content is the most viewed, with the Contact, Quick Links, and Teach/Learn sections barely viewed at all in comparison. The Unique Pageviews bear out this pattern and the full table of data is available in the spreadsheet at the end of the post.
Two questions we agreed to ask of the Google Analytics tool were “What are the top five links on the LIS home page?” and “What are the five least clicked links on the LIS home page?” Here are the top five:
- Library & Information Services (6539)
- Articles, Indexes, Research Sources (6160)
- Find Books, Articles & More (4289)
- Middlebury (Home Page) (3175)
- Course Reserves (3059)
Here are the five least clicked:
- Content Provider (LIS website) (0)
- P2P Music & Video Filesharing (0)
- Telephone Services (0)
- Digital Media Development (2)
- Departmental & Workgroup Directories (3)
The full lists, as well as the lists for the landing page of each sub-site are contained in the spreadsheet at the end of this post.
One question that I was not able to answer was about click paths to the blogging and wiki sites. This question can’t really be answered for a couple reasons. First, we don’t have a full year of data for those other services and, second, links to those services would go through redirect posting which are flawed for the reasons described above. If there are sites within the LIS site that you would like to see click-path analysis for, please let me know specifically what resources we should examine.
Here are the broad recommendations I draw from this analysis:
- The Quicklinks section gets little traffic. This should be removed from the site IA. A better designed site with the addition of a search landing page should not need this section.
- Other than the link to the CTLR, the Teaching & Learning site is not used. Rather than try to have this information live in multiple places, any relevent content should be moved from here to CTLR and this sub-site should be replaced with a simple link to CTLR.
- The Hours, Locations, Maps section is really the only think people click on About LIS to see. We should have this information on the LIS search landing page and move the remainder of the content elsewhere.
- The Departmental Directory is not used, but the full Staff Directory is used. Eliminate both and replace with a link to the LIS search results in the central Directory, which is the same information as the Staff Directory. (Forthcoming improvements to the central Directory interface will improve this experience).
- The Quick Phone and Email Contacts is the primary resource in Contact LIS. Eliminate the rest of the sub-site and add this information to the LIS search landing page.
- The links in the top sections of the sub-site landing pages such as below “Need help?” on the Library site are rarely clicked. Avoid this interface in future site designs.
- The “Did you know…?” sections of the LIS site are rarely visited. Consolidate this information into a central blog about LIS.
Here is the complete spreadsheet of results.
July 27th, 2009 by Alex Chapin
A common approach to choosing a technology solution is to create a “feature matrix” which lists all the features required and numerical rates or weights each solution’s implementation of that feature. The best solution is then that one with the highest “score.”
For a good critique of this strategy see: CMS Selection – Death to the Features Matrix. This article suggests another approach, that of listing “doubts” regarding the importance of features or a solution’s implementation of a feature.
July 27th, 2009 by Barbara Merz
How important is it for you to reach each of these audiences with your web content?
Students, faculty, LIS staff = “very important”
Other staff = “quite important”
Alumni, other = “less” to “unimportant”
________________________________________________________________
How often do YOU use these LIS website features?
Often: catalog
Sometimes: helpdesk documentation, LIS staff directory, Newsletters, LIS blogs, LIS Wiki
Never: subject guides
Didn’t know existed: NONE! good.
_______________________________________________________________
What features of the LIS website work or could be improved?
Work: research guides
Need improvement: help documentation, website searching, LIS org structure, LIS depts staffing info, services/depts loctions, hours of service, space availability, who to contact for what
Unfamiliar: staff accomplishments, status of systems, LIS events calendar, tagging
3-way tie: emergency procedures
_________________________________________________________________
Do users often contact you for information that is available on the website?
yes = 65% e.g. hours, documentation.
_________________________________________________________________
Is there information not on the LIS Website that would be useful to include?
yes = 58% (22 of 42 responses)- no theme of what’s missing is apparent.
Some comments on difficulty of finding what’s there already.
__________________________________________________________________
What is your level of comfort with the following technologies?
Most to least comfortable, overall -
Blogs, Wikis, IM, CMS, RSS, Surveying
___________________________________________________________________
What specific areas of the current site do you feel are successful? Why are they successful?
MIDCAT gets a few mentions. Documentation. Some comments apply to College website not LIS.
_________________________________________________________________
Is there anything else you’d like the LIS Website Team to know about?
22 responses – most common theme – need to improve access to info already there! “info is buried” “difficult to find things” etc.
____________________________________________________________________
Please rate your overall experience in navigating the LIS website.
Frustrating = 52% OK = 48% Love it = none.
Should be possible to show improvement on this metric.
July 24th, 2009 by Doreen Bernier
Submitted by Mike Roy
Henry Schaffer, Professor Emeritus of Genetics and Biomathematics and Coordinator of Special IT Projects and Faculty Collaboration – North Carolina State University
Sarah Stein, Associate Professor of Communication and Virtual Computing Lab (VCL)
Academic Outreach and Collaboration – North Carolina State University
Topic: Cloud Computing for the Academic Institution
Date: July 29, 2009
Time: 1:00 p.m. EDT (12:00 p.m. CDT, 11:00 a.m. MDT, 10:00 a.m. PDT).
International participants: You may wish to visit this external time-conversion website to calculate the start time in your time zone. Duration: 1 hour
The Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) is a cloud computing solution that is designed to address the unique needs of academic institutions. Computational resources for teaching faculty, students, and researchers require flexibility in order to be effective in diverse environments. The VCL enables this in an unprecedentedly affordable manner. This talk will present an overview of the VCL and discuss the computing resource problems that initiated it, the advantages and limitations of its use, and its pedagogical impact, as well as the economic implications of cloud computing.
The event is free, but registration is required and virtual seating is limited. REGISTER NOW.
July 24th, 2009 by Elin Waagen
Submitted by Elin Waagen
 Congratulations to Rich Church on the completion of the huge book shift project on the upper level at the Main Library. This project utilized creative collaboration with other work areas and was completed ahead of the August deadline without incurring additional budget costs.
Approximately 19,148 linear feet (or almost 4 miles) of books in the A – K group were shifted to accommodate growth and classification changes.
July 24th, 2009 by Ian McBride
The Google Search Appliance lets us create “collections” of portions of the site that can be searched. These collections are what you see in the drop-down field on http://search.middlebury.edu. The LIS collection is also the one being searched if you enter a query on the LIS or Library home pages on the CMS. This collection is searched much, much less frequently than the main search, however we may find the results interesting.
Here are the top 15 queries of the LIS search collection in the last year:
| jstor |
51 |
| tigercat |
15 |
| eres |
11 |
| psychinfo |
10 |
| special collections |
9 |
| mla |
8 |
| citation |
8 |
| JSTOR |
8 |
| oxford english dictionary |
8 |
| lexis nexis |
7 |
| thesis |
7 |
| printing |
7 |
| library hours |
7 |
| music library |
7 |
| segue |
6 |
And here is the same for the LIS Wiki collection:
| novell |
2 |
| server |
2 |
| tigercat |
2 |
| computer upgrade schedule |
1 |
| inurl:pdf |
1 |
| proprietary name |
1 |
| freeze |
1 |
| video |
1 |
| antivirus software |
1 |
| Novell, Tigercat |
1 |
| How to use Novell and Tigercat |
1 |
| wordpress |
1 |
| blog |
1 |
| after graduating |
1 |
| Controller’s Office |
1 |
For comparison, and so you can see how infrequently the LIS search collection is used, here are the top 15 LIS-related queries from the “All” collection, which as you might expect indexes all the other collections:
| segue |
1152 |
| library |
388 |
| email |
306 |
| tigercat |
246 |
| webmail |
214 |
| bannerweb |
163 |
| library hours |
129 |
| INB |
119 |
| jstor |
108 |
| inb |
103 |
| eres |
102 |
| banner web |
83 |
| netstorage |
77 |
| banner |
72 |
| computers |
71 |
(Note on this last one: midcat is the 16th term with 70 queries).
You can see the full reports for each, which include more information at these on-campus-only links:
Report for LIS Collection 07/24/2008-07/24/2009
Report for LIS Wiki Collection 07/24/2008-07/24/2009
Report for All Collection 07/24/2008-07/24/2009
I also sent an email to Chris Norris asking for assistance getting us some information from Google Analytics. He was out yesterday and today, but appears to be in his office next week, just booked straight through with meetings. I’ll keep you posted on this item. Here is the list of questions I sent him:
1. What are the top 5 search terms within the LIS? (I’ll get this from the GSA)
2. What are the top 5 pages on the LIS site?
3. What is the most common click path from /academics/lis to the LISt blog and the LIS Wiki?
4. What links on /academics/lis (the landing page) are clicked on the least?
5. Same as (4), but applied to /academics/lis/lib, /academics/lis/help, and /academics/lis/about.
July 23rd, 2009 by Elizabeth Whitaker-Freitas
I really liked it. I stayed after and asked Janie about the possibility of using mini equalizers within the sub-sites. She was hoping that we would use them. She also told me that they would be willing and interested in working with the LIS Website Team to help us organize our site as well as making suggestions for the actual design. Glad I stayed to ask a question!
July 22nd, 2009 by Ian McBride
I started the LIS Website Recommendations document a few weeks ago, based on my personal views of the project and some of the discussions we have had early on during team meetings. I will commit to working later in this week to flesh this document out more with specific references to materials which support the changes it recommends. However, here are some framing questions we can use to think about these recommendations.
What sections of this document conflict with goals of the team?
What goals of the team are missing from this document?
What changes do we need to make to these recommendations based on the survey results?
What changes do we need to make to these recommendations based on other data sources?
What resources should we reference within this document to support the recommendations it proscribes?
July 22nd, 2009 by Ian McBride
This is a place to coordinate discussion about the criteria we desire for the LIS site. We’ve created two sections in the wiki to store this information:
How can we combine these sections? Do we need to combine these sections?
What information from our own personal views are missing from these sections?
What information from our survey results is missing from these sections?
What information from the other analytics and analysis we’ve conducted is missing from these sections?
What information in these sections should be removed or is no longer applicable knowing what we know now?
How do these criteria allow us to meet our goals and achieve our vision?
July 22nd, 2009 by Ian McBride
MCMS Permissions
I’ve prepared a spreadsheet of MCMS editing permissions for the LIS website. This also includes the Telephone Services site, which is under /administration, rather than the rest of the LIS site, which is in /academics. The permissions are structured as a hierarchy, so if you are in the “(middcms) www – academics – lis” group, you can edit anywhere within the LIS site.
Here are what the roles means:
- Channel Manager: can edit anywhere, approve all changes, and change the IA.
- Editor: can make changes and publish their changes. Can approve changes by others.
- Author: can make changes, but cannot approve changes for publication.
- Resource Manager: can upload files (images/documents).
- Subscriber: can view content (used for content in restricted channels).
Google Analytics
We only came up with 2.5 questions that we want answered by looking at the analytics. Do you have other suggestions for things we could look at? What are some key resources or pages on the site that we want to look at click paths to? To refresh everyone, here are the questions we came up with:
- What are the top 5 search terms, specific to the LIS site?
- What are the top 5 pages on the LIS site?
- What are the common click paths to [resource] on the LIS site?
July 22nd, 2009 by Elin Waagen
10 things Ten Things to Think about when Designing Digital Experiences.
July 21st, 2009 by Ian McBride
The first meeting to review the feedback posted to the Web Makeover Blog for the online Directory occurred this afternoon. We agreed to a set of updates that will be made to the Directory prior to the start of the academic year in anticipation of the retirement of the print version of the Directory. These changes will focus on ensuring that the information included in the print Directory is accessible in the online version and small improvements in the online interface. We won’t be completely revising how the Directory work at this time, as we expect further changes to occur as a result of the Web Redo Project’s revisions to our overall Search strategy.
Here is what I’ll be working on changing:
- Add the Department contact information to the Directory as a downloadable PDF. This is already done! We heard loud and clear that the information in the front of the Directory needed to be accessible online, and we’ve added a link to a PDF containing this information. The added advantage of this being in PDF form, for now, is that we recognize that this is the type of contact information people might need when they are not able to access a computer, either because the power’s out, or they’re working in a location without access to a machine, or traveling. You can print out this information at your leisure as a quick contact list for these situations.
- Add A-Z links at the top of the Directory interface. Clicking on a letter will show a list of people whose last name begins with that letter and you can click on their name to see their record. This will give you a quick way to glance through the Directory.
- We will add a field to the search form that lets you specify whether you want to search for only Faculty, Staff, Students, Language School personnel, MMLA, etc.
- We will add a field to let you search by just first name, or just last name.
- Approval of new photos will transfer to HR, and possibly other departments as makes sense.
- In coordination with HR, we’ll review the current display settings for each field. There may be changes to how display settings permissions are handled in the Directory.
- We’ll investigate a way to provide access to an online form year round that lets people update their Directory information.
This may not appear particularly ambitious, but we wanted to focus on what could be completed by the start of the academic year and not set ourselves up to be in a position where we’d have to redo this all depending on the work we’ll be doing for the rollout of the new website in January. I personally think this list helps address many of the concerns raised in the comments on the Web Redo Blog.
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