Posts Tagged ‘communication’Communication role for web teamOctober 7th, 2009 by Barbara MerzDo we want to broaden the the web team’s charge to include “communications within LIS”? Can we clarify what this means!? We have already proposed the LIS one blog as a major communication tool. To consider communications more broadly probably should involve gathering info about current communications, discussion of what various LIS ares/departments/staff need and want etc. etc. Is this something that should happen now? Comment here!! More on blog categoriesSeptember 9th, 2009 by Jess IslerFor discussion.
Do we need an All LIS category? One Blog to Pool them AllSeptember 8th, 2009 by Ian McBrideHere are my initial ideas of how this could be organized. Existing Infrastructure We’ll take the current LISt blog, rename it to just “LIS” and grant all staff in LIS Editor access to the blog. Student workers and LIS-related people like department advisory groups will have Author access granted as needed. Porting Content Users and groups with existing blogs may move their content into the LIS blog by going to Tools -> Export -> Download Export file in their blog, then Tools -> Import -> WordPress -> Upload file and Import. After doing so, they should go to Posts -> Categories and use the Category to Tag Converter to change any custom categories their blog had into tags on the LIS blog. Categories The LIS blog will start with this set of categories:
All other existing categories in the LIS blog will be changed to tags. In general, we’ll encourage the use to tags to mark things like posts that have photos in them, posts about particular workgroups, posts about particular projects, or other things that tend to have a more temporally mutable quality to them. Categories will be used chiefly for broad categories that change infrequently. Private Blogs The LIS blog will not be used to store private content. Groups, such as ACS, who wish to have a private blog should continue to use and maintain their blog in its present form or create new private blogs if one has not yet been set up. Internal vs. External Posts that are likely to be interesting only to LIS staff should be marked with the Internal category. Examples of this content might include a notice about LIS goal setting. Note that these posts would still be readable by the public, but that those subscribed to the public feed wouldn’t see them in the feed. Posts that are likely to have broader appeal, like a cookie party for students, should be marked with the External category, or both the Internal and External categories. There will be links to both the External and Internal feeds on the blog homepage with a description of the content featured in each so that site visitors can choose how they will read about LIS. Answers from Joe (paraphrased)August 26th, 2009 by Ian McBride1. Can we have a folder in middfiles for documents related to the LIS web redo? Sure. Just create a new folder in the Web Redo Project Managers area for LIS. 2. When will the next round(s) of Drupal training be offered? A second round of test training will be offered to the Project Managers group starting the week of 9/21. LIS Website Team members may request to attend as may the LIS Project Managers, though it would be a good idea to ensure that any who do attend are caught up on the current process, workbook, etc. Also, all involved should understand that they probably won’t be able to immediately go back and edit their site in Drupal after these sessions. There will be training work shops and sessions offered later in October for content editors at which point people should be doing content editing in the Drupal CMS. 3. Can we schedule a meeting with White Whale during their visit? Probably. Joe is, at the (not so) very least going to schedule a meeting with Tonya, who is responsible for the IA & Content Recommendations documents. I have a feeling that most of our questions will involve her. Joe will try to have the others from White Whale present for this meeting, if schedules allow. We should have a list of questions we want to ask going into the meeting. They will be on campus the week of 9/14. Questions from primary contact meetingsAugust 25th, 2009 by Jess IslerI thought I’d share with the team some questions my primary contacts had (or I had) after our initial meetings. Some of these questions are easily answered, and some raise other questions. I just thought I’d get them out to see what other people have been thinking about and discussing in their meetings. Maybe I’ll put a new section in the Wiki for LIS primary contact meetings FAQs…
AD Meeting ReportAugust 11th, 2009 by Ian McBrideI covered the following topics during the meeting:
Questions from the ADs and my paraphrased responses: What can we do about time pressures? I mentioned that we weren’t requesting peoples tasks to be juggled or reassigned, but we did want the ADs to know that some members wanted to spend more time on this project. I noted that we understood that the amount of time we spend on project work will vary during the course of the project. I can explain more during our weekly meeting. What resources do you need [the ADs] to provide? We don’t have specific resource requests at this time, though we may have more after our meeting with Jeff on the 20th. We will also ask the LIS Project Managers what additional resources they will require to work on their areas of the LIS website and will send these requests to the AD team as appropriate. What about forms that send information to people in LIS? [book order form, helpdesk request, etc.] I said that this was something we had not considered previously, but providing access to these forms does seem within scope of our project and is something we should consider in our recommendations. I promised to bring up this topic during one of our next meetings. What about an issue/request tracking system on the web? Developing/purchasing such a system is not within the scope of our project. However, should LIS acquire or develop this system, we may have recommendations on how best to provide access to its information through the web. As LIS does not have such a system at this time, developing these recommendations is not a priority for our work. Where is LIS in the site information architecture? The Library website will be part of the Academics section of the site. LIS will not have a traditional site on the CMS, but the LIS landing page may be accessible in the Offices & Services section, through Search, through Quick Links, etc. I’m a faculty member and I want to know about the curricular technology options that are available to me. How do I find this out? This is specifically the question that we are looking to the curricular technology team to answer, which is why we have identified that team as a Project Manager for a portion of the LIS website. Google Analytics for LISJuly 27th, 2009 by Ian McBrideBefore 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:
Here are the five least clicked:
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:
Here is the complete spreadsheet of results. Thoughts about meetings, process etc.July 20th, 2009 by Barbara MerzTwo things I’m thinking about: 1) Use of blog & wiki – I was moved to send out e-mails to all of you because I thought if I posted on the blog/wiki you’d be unlikely to see the posting (about the survey) quickly. Is this true for some of us anyway? I feel like I get lost in the non-linear nature of the communications & yes – I know we can search, should be set up to get notifications of new postings etc. etc. but I’m not feeling this is completely sucessful. 2) meetings & agenda. I think that a useful discussion between 8 people on almost any topic is going to take longer than 10 minutes. Understanding that time is passing & meeting time is limited, do you think we should break into smaller groups to discuss different topics? That seems to me the only way to be able to cover the agenda items so quickly! If agenda items regularly have to be pushed to the next meeting & we always are rushing I’m not sure that we will do the best job. Barbara Links to Resources for ConsiderationJuly 1st, 2009 by Ian McBrideI’ve added a section to the LIS Website Wiki with links to some resources we should look at as part of this project. Of special note are the strategic recommendations from White Whale, where I recommend reading the sections “Blogs dot Middlebury”, “Midd Search”, and “Managing content in an unpredictable environment” as those are the most relevant to our project, though the rest of the document is interesting as well. I’ve also linked to the test instance of Drupal that I set up for the Helpdesk. You can log in as yourself, but you won’t really be able to do anything, so you might want to log in as an admin instead (username is “admin” and password is “testpassword”). Poke around and have fun. Don’t worry about messing anything up, as I’ve got this whole thing backed up and can recreate a fresh copy in about 20 seconds. Just let me know if I need to. If you want to ask me questions about Drupal, feel free to do so here or stop by my office any time I’m not in a meeting and I can help you out. I’ve also listed our scope from the meeting and added a page to discuss the metrics and how we’ll measure success. How to get blog updatesJune 25th, 2009 by Ian McBrideElin suggested we add in a way to subscribe by email, so you can now do that at through the email subscription form, or even using the form in this post. There are also the entries RSS and comments RSS feeds. I personally use Google Reader to collect all my feeds. The Circ Team is bloggingJanuary 19th, 2009 by Elin WaagenSubmitted by Elin Waagen During the past year, Circulation Services expanded the use of shared departmental mailboxes, folders, calendars and wiki pages to include a departmental blog. This proved to be an easy to use, easily searchable format for staying current with frequent updates – and reduced the barrage of inter-departmental email considerably. Yammering at MIISOctober 31st, 2008 by Bob ColeSubmitted by Bob Cole, MIIS
This, however, changed recently when a TLC colleague, Sarah Springer mentioned a new tool in a brief conversation. She said something about a crowdsourcing tool named Yammer. I didn’t write it down or Tweet about it, but it did stick in my mind. I An added feature that Yammer offers is the ability to tag posts with hashmarks. So, it I share an event I could include the #event tag and my yammer msg would be added to that tag archive, very much like blogging categories or tags work as well. I can even follow a given tag in Yammer and receive a digest e-mail of activity. I’ll continue to tap into my Twitter network as beohbe, but am excited by the possibilities that Yammering in-house learning and sharing will bring as we continue to experiment with communication and collaboration tools here in Monterey. Thoughts on all-LIS staff meetingsJuly 24th, 2008 by Michael RoySubmitted by Mike Roy LIS Staff Meetings As part of taking stock of how well LIS does with internal communications, and with staying connected with the overall mission of the College, we want to think about what role, if any, a regular all-LIS staff meeting might play in improving our internal communications. To that end, we’ve developed a simple questionaire that will help us in this process. We would like to know: 1. What value do you see in having an all-LIS staff meeting? You can answer these questions by submitting comments to this post. We’ll be asking similar questions about some of our other communication practices on an on-going basis. As part of that process, Doreen is compiling an inventory of all of the various ways that we communicate with each other. That list can be found at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=d8bvdvp_0gmvqdnht if you wish to add something to the list, send your addition to Doreen (dbernier@middlebury.edu) or ask her to add you as an editor of the document. |
I have been personally experimenting with 