October eWAC meeting

Here are a couple of things that I wanted to report to you and/or wanted your feedback on:

1. What's holding up the server move?
A couple of things: testing how the New Books List will work in the new non-carbon environment and testing our feedback forms (which use PHP) in the new environment. I'm working on these as fast as I can, and I'm hoping that the time it takes me to do this will see a decline in the number of classes we're teaching to minimize any disruption and give us some wiggle room to make the transition.

This move, when it happens, will go down as follows: move LEAP, the online linking form, the ADI, the class calendar, and the new books list to the new environment and test them, leaving the current web page setup in place for users. A day or two later, when all is confirmed stable, we'll need to load any data that's been entered into these applications on the live server (so that classes scheduled, tutorials taken, etc., aren't lost in the shuffle). Then, our carbon environment will be turned off, and I will need to restore everyone's Dreamweaver/Contribute connections.

The final piece of this puzzle is that our DNS entries (i.e., which URLs will work) will be consolidated so that carbon.cudenver.edu/public/library and library.cudenver.edu will be redirected to library.auraria.edu. We'll leave the redirect up for at least six months, and at that time, we'll have a look at our statistics to see if these two URLs are still being used to get to the site. Our statistics can tell us where links to the two "old" URLs are coming from. (For example, CCD still links to the library with the carbon address, and UCD the library.cudenver.edu address).

2. How long should we leave up the web page survey?
We have 70 results as of this morning, 69 of them students and 1 faculty. I 've asked the bibliographers, who have much more regular contact with faculty than me, to publicize the survey so that we can get faculty feedback. I'm pretty pleased with what they're telling us; I've posted an Excel file of the results so far here:

http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~nmchale/documents/newhomepagesurvey.xls

Names and email addresses have been removed. Of course, you can't please 100% of the people 100% of the time; about five people have said that the best thing about the new site is the link to the old one. Ah, well. At least that shows that we've managed the transition well? I'll put a reminder up on the home page early December to remind everyone that that link is going away.

But, more to the point, how long should we leave the survey up? All semester? If so, should we have the drawing for the student prizes (book store gift certificates) at our November meeting, and then just leave the survey up if anyone wants to fill it out for the heck of it? The benefit of leaving it up all semester is that we'll get through the point of the semester that REALLY gets heavy web site use. Of course, students will have less time to fill out silly surveys then. Your thoughts?

3. 360 Search Launched!
I've asked for library-wide feedback on this, and my plan is to let us all play with it for a while, and then WAC will have a look at the comments that come back (posted in the blog entry made just before this one) and make any decisions that need to be made.

4. Whither the ADI now that we have 360 Search?
This discussion is currently taking place. No final decisions have been made yet, but the consensus seems to be to eventually retire the ADI. Another meeting about this matter is taking place next week; more will follow as it develops.

Anything else? Please post any comments below. Thanks!