Web Services Update – April 2013

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As we start to gear up for the spring/summer, I thought it would be a good time to give you an overview of some of the major projects that the Web Services team is working on:

Librarian profile pages: Our progress on implementing Librarian profile pages has been delayed for months due to technical issues with the McGill Profile system. We have started discussions with the McGill Web Services team about implementing our own profile functionality in order to move forward with this project. Initial discussions have been fruitful, and I expect that we will be able to start moving forward with the implementation soon.

Room booking: We will be piloting a new system for handling room bookings that will be much easier to use, requiring less support and assistance from staff. We plan on rolling the service out to branches as quickly as possible.

Digital exhibits and collections: We have several digital collection and exhibit sites in various stages of process (Chapbooks, Gwillim, Interacting with Print, Colgate, Islamic Studies 60th Anniversary) that will be launching over the coming months. In addition, we are in the process of planning several projects relating to our digital collections, and we’ll share details here as soon as these plans are finalized.

Intranet: We have completed our review of different technical solutions, and will be going forward with implementing our Intranet as a Drupal-based web site. This site will be hosted and managed by the Library (i.e. it won’t be part of the WMS), which will give us more control over the features and functionality we can implement. The Intranet will be used to publish information such as policies, procedures, reports, etc for Library staff.

Extranet: We are also setting up an Extranet, an online space where people or groups inside the Library can collaborate and share files with people outside the Library. The Extranet will use McGill’s CenterStage platform to provide this functionality.

In addition, over the course of the spring and summer we are planning on making significant improvements to the Library web site. These changes will impact many people, and so we will be reaching out and working closely with various stakeholders (including the E-Search committee, content owners, library staff, and end-users) to identify requirements and ensure that the site will continue to meet their needs. Our plan is to have any major changes in place by the middle of August.

Home page: We will be revisiting the design of the home page to provide a simplified search experience and better access to tools for finding articles, journals and other resources. We also want to improve access to the resources within our subject areas, changes that will start on the home page and continue down through the subject landing pages to the subject guides themselves. Links to commonly-used pages as well as information about news and events going on at the Library will continue be featured on home page.

Site organization: We will be revisiting the organization of the site to make it more intuitive, less complicated, and easier to use. We will start by working with the various content owners within the Library to ensure that their content is relevant and well-presented. We will then look at the best way to label and organize the content from the perspective of our users. We will also be making use of some of the new navigational tools provided by the WMS to make our menus simpler and easier to use.

Branch pages: Branch pages will be redesigned to provide a cleaner layout and to make it easier for users to locate key information about branches. We also want to provide an easy and quick way for branches to get announcements out to users, and we’ll be working that into the branch pages as well.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me (edward.bilodeau@mcgill.ca).

Time wasted or time invested?

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Yesterday afternoon was our kinda-monthly Library Council meeting. Most academic libraries have a Library Council or something like it: a group made up of  all librarians and/or academic staff in the Library, meant to discuss and make decisions and/or recommendations on matters relating to the academic work of librarians. (This description is probably over-generalized and over-simplified, but I didn’t want to just say, “a bunch of librarians”).

Here at the McGill Library, Library Council was only recently (i.e. in the last few years) reinstated, which means that we are still in the process of figuring out the nuts and bolts of how it will work and the role it will play in the Library. This means that a fair amount of time in these meetings is consumed discussing process, procedures, rules of order, etc. Quite frankly, this kind of thing drives me crazy, not because I don’t think it is important (although I don’t think it is as important as some others feel it is), but mostly because discussing these things ad nauseum in large groups violates one of my guiding principles, and that is the value of abstraction. In this case, there are other people who have more experience, knowledge, and interest in drafting these policies and procedures, and I trust them to be able to put together a draft for the rest of us to review, comment on, and move forward for adoption. I am entirely comfortable abstracting the entire process and letting it run under the guidance of others.

My point here isn’t to get into the tangle of issues that have brought about the current state of our Library Council, but rather to point out that for the most part, I usually feel that the 1.5 hours per month I spend in Library Council is not the best use of my time.

But sometimes great things can happen. Back in October, we passed a motion in support of open access. Then yesterday, we passed a motion in support of Dale Askey, a librarian from McMaster who is being sued by a publisher for having criticized the quality of their publications on his blog.

In the grand scheme of things, passing motions alone will not change the world. But being able to make even these small things happen at the Library is important, if only because they point to the fact that we are starting to have a mechanism by which librarians can come together, discuss issues, and then decide upon a collective course of action.

So it is these small things that remind me that maybe after all having to spend 1.5 hours each month trying to make Library Council work is worth it after all. After all, if we can achieve these things in our current state, just imagine what we’ll be able to accomplish once we get past the start-up phase and start to tackle some of the bigger challenges we face!