NOTE: ** = Required Field
**Type of report being submitted: Committee Final Report
**Date: June 7, 2006
**Committee Name: Web Committee
**Supervising Board Member: Laurel Bliss
**Chair, Co-Chairs, Assistant Chairs: Steve Brantley, Tim Donohue (Co-Chairs)
**Committee members: Micheal Bolam, Andrea Delumeau, Karen Kohn, John Meier, Amanda Yesilbas
**Goals, Objectives, Projects completed (including, but not limited to, any procedures, tip sheets, checklists, etc. created during the reporting year):
· Update all links, correct broken links
· Encourage all committees to have a web presence on ALA Website
· Assist NMRT “Footnotes” in migrating archives to ALA site
**Action Items/Issues To Be Resolved – What plans/projects remain which will be carried over or postponed until next year? Have there been any substantial changes in plans requiring a reconsideration or cancellation of projects? Information regarding such will be helpful for future chairs and planners.
· Lack of support from ALA Web Team on development of an NMRT Blog. Would need special software to be installed and, preferably, integrated with current ALA CMS. May have to wait for release of new ALA CMS. (Could ALA Communities be used instead? – see below)
· NMRT could be taking better advantage of the new ALA Communities, but we would need to decide on an organizational structure (“one community for all of NMRT” versus “separate communities for each committee”, etc).
o We (Steve & I) have discussed that although usage of ALA Communities could be very worthwhile, it would be best to avoid having all “communities” managed centrally by the Web Committee. A better management scheme could be to have each NMRT Committee (which wants a community) appoint someone to manage their community. In that way each Committee can have more control over who is allowed to post/modify/add to areas of their community. This would require each Committee to get a better familiarity with how the ALA Community system works, and the Web Committee could still act as “support” for major questions/problems. However, it would avoid bogging down the Web Committee with smaller tasks (e.g. managing user access) to support every NMRT Community.
o Currently these Communities are under-advertised, and still a little “clunky”, in terms of the interface, etc. However, ALA Communities do give committees more opportunity to hold online meetings (via online chat tool), have a committee “blog” (using the “announcements” tool), and create online discussion forums.
§ However, Steve & I feel that most of these features may not be necessary for committees within NMRT (which can oftentimes more easily communicate via email/phone). However, it may be that NMRT as a whole may wish to establish some of these features for general discussions among NMRT members, etc.
· Contacted SASCO about their need for a Contacts Web Form. Have not heard back. Hopefully next year this can be put on the agenda.
· After further talk with the ALA Helpdesk and Web team, redesign of NMRT website (with a different “stylesheet”) is not allowed, under current ALA website guidelines. Currently, only ALA Divisions are allowed to have their own custom “stylesheet”. All roundtables are required to use the default ALA stylesheet, so that their websites match the ALA website. From our understanding, this policy will not change with the new CMS.
o This policy does not stop the NMRT Web Committee from restructuring the NMRT website. However, this restructuring may be better done with the arrival of the new ALA CMS (which latest reports indicate should be in place by December 2006 at the latest).
Financial Report Section:
|
Your budget appropriation (see budget) |
a. $0 |
Amount which you have spent this year |
b. $0 |
|
Difference between budgeted amount and amount spent (a-b) |
c. $0 |
**Report submitted by: Tim Donohue, Steve Brantley
**Email address: tdonohue@uiuc.edu, jbrant1@uic.edu