RBMS Web Team

Report for ALA Midwinter 2011

The Web Team functions under the auspices of the Publications Committee of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). This report was written by Web Team members and compiled by Shannon Supple, Web Editor (2010-2011)

WEB TEAM MEMBERS

Editors (Ex-Officio to Publications):

Shannon K. Supple (2009-2012) – Web Editor (2010-2011)

Christopher Thomas Smith (2006 - 2011) – Senior Web Editor

Jason Kovari (2010-2013) – Assistant Web Editor

Liaisons:

Randal Brandt (2009--) – Bibliographic Standards Committee Liaison

Katie Carr (2009--) – Security Committee Liaison and Omeka project lead

Eva Rose Guggemos (2009--) – Membership and Professional Development Committee Liaison

Melissa Hubbard (2010--) – Publications Committee Liaison and Preconference media coordinator

Christine Megowan (2010--) – Exhibition Awards and Seminars Committees Liaison, digress.it project

Kate Moriarty (2010--) – Executive Committee Liaison

Lynne M. Thomas (2009--) – Social Media Liaison

Web Editors Emeriti:

James P. Ascher

Christian Yves Dupont

John Pull

REPORT

I. Overall Website Statistics

Since the website statistics were last reported (11 June 2010) until now (7 December 2010), rbms.info has had 57,553 visits, and 103,994 page views with an average of 1.81 pages per visit. Once again, a substantial percentage of the views were for “Your Old Books” (37,705 page views, 36.26%), followed by the main page (12,479 page views, 12.00%), the Controlled Vocabularies (5,641 views, 5.42%), the preconference index page (3,060 views, 2.94%) and the Membership and Professional Development Committee’s Educational Opportunities Directory (2,450 views, 2.36%).

Most of our website’s traffic continues to stem from search engines (65.86% of visits), and the top five keywords are “rbms” (5.87% of visits), “old books” (3.76%), “value of old books” (1.23%), and “your old books” (1.12%). Most visitors have IP addresses located in the United States (47,338 visits, 75.28%) and report their language as English (55,377 visits, 96.20%). The dominant browsers continue to be Internet Explorer (49.43% of visits) and Firefox (33.95%), though Safari (9.22%) and Chrome (6.24%) also show significant use. Similarly, the dominant operating systems remain Windows (84.20% of visits) and Mac (12.78%), but there has been a smattering of mobile platforms used (including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices) (1.91%).

II. Continuing Projects

A. Experiments with Drupal:

One request of several committees was to develop a structure more amenable to collaborative editing on the web site. Christopher Thomas Smith designed an experimental Drupal-based space for rbms.info, in which the Web Team began experimenting with new mechanisms for content development and delivery. The M&PD Committee document “Careers in Rare Books and Manuscripts: Frequently Asked Questions” continues to be hosted as a test case. A second test case was created for the News Editor as a space to share the news and events pertinent to the RBMS community that was previously shared through the RBMS Newsletter. The News Editor’s blog was created in Drupal test space and once the kinks have been worked out, it will be moved to the live Drupal site. These spaces live at the experimental subdomain new.rbms.info. Drupal-based experiments will continue and other documents will be explored as possible inclusions.

B. Thesaurus Design:

Following 2010 ALA Annual in Washington, D.C., the proposed expandable XML/XSLT-based thesaurus beta design was questioned concerning its effectiveness with forthcoming changes to the RBMS thesaurus. After consideration of its long-term sustainability, the project has shifted to a collaborative test between the Controlled Vocabularies Team and the Web Team of TemaTres, an open source thesaurus editor. This test includes installation of TemaTres on rbms.info and importing data from the current thesaurus editing software, MultiTes.

C. Omeka Project:

The Omeka Leab Awards project has been cancelled due to problems with Omeka. A different online gallery of Leab Awards recipients is in the works, to be headed (at least initially) by Jason Kovari.

D. Collaborative Editing with digress.it:

Nina Schneider, Jane Carpenter, James P. Ascher, and Eduardo Tenenbaum collaborated to develop a platform for the collaborative editing of the DCRM(B) Examples and the proposed DCRM(S) Examples. The fifty original examples illustrating the now outdated DCRB have been, or are being, revised to reflect changes made when Bibliographic Standards and ACRL adopted DCRM(B). There are also a number of examples from Deborah J. Leslie’s Rare Book Cataloging workshop from Rare Book School and a selection of examples and accompanying rules provided by volunteers. This platform will allow catalogers other interested individuals to comment upon the use of specific rules, or the application of rules in general. All comments will be public. The discussion of the DCRM(B) Examples is available at http://rbms.info/digress.

Institutionalizing digress.it as a Tool: digress.it has been used to edit the DCRM(B) Examples. Jane Gillis expressed interest from the DCRM(S), as has Erin Blake for DCRM(G). Examples group at using the same system. James agreed to develop a procedure for creating and maintaining the digress.it blogs and document this in the wiki. James will continue with this project and will train Christine Megowan on it as well so that both can act as Web Team liaisons to the DCRM(_) Examples groups.

E. Social Media Projects:

Individuals and Committees within RBMS have expressed a strong desire to explore various social media and web 2.0 tools. Lynne Thomas and Shannon Supple continue experimenting with a Twitter feed and Facebook page for RBMS.

Twitter is a tool for transmitting short snippets of text such as news and discussions as well as links to useful or interesting information. The official RBMS stream was started January 21, 2010 at @RBMSinfo (http://twitter.com/RBMSinfo). As of 29 October 2010, we have 204 followers (compared to 120 as of 16 July 2010) and we are following 162 Twitter users (compared to 105 as of 16 July 2010). Our policy continues to be to follow anyone who follows us as long as they are at least vaguely related to libraries, archives, the book trade, or special collections.) We are included in 30 lists, up from 19 as of 16 July 2010. (Lists are made by Twitter users; those in which we are included are library-related.) We have posted 518 tweets (including "retweets," tweets by others that we have passed along) as of 29 October 2010.

Facebook is a popular social network and RBMS now has an official Facebook page, which was created on 19 July 2010 by Lynne Thomas. Our Facebook page has been a mild success; there are 95 subscribers at the moment. What has mostly been posted are job ads, as a service to RBMS members who might not be on ExLibris. Since it is specifically listed as a "beta" Facebook page, and is experimental, we have not done a lot of cross posting (for instance, from the RBMS twitter feed). That could certainly change if there is interest. Since we are not currently posting a lot of content, there is not much activity. Lynne suggests that we branch out into using it as an additional outlet for RBMS news updates. Our Facebook followers are not necessarily active RBMS members.

The RBMS preconference 2011 Facebook page has been created, but has not been populated. Lynne suggests that, as the Preconference website itself goes live, there should also be content added to the preconference page, as additional advertising.

AddThis is a linking service that allows users to transmit web pages on various services. The Team added it site-wide 13 March 2010. Since being added we have had 82 total shares, including 47 for Your Old Books and 13 for the RBMS.INFO homepage. (The other shares are spread throughout the website with 1-3 shares per page.) The character of the services used to share our website continues: 35% print, 26% email, 12% Facebook, and others at 4% or less. These numbers continue to be small but are growing slowly.

These results continue to suggest that the Section’s approach to social media should be to establish a small, carefully-managed presence using official indicators to the resources, promote the resource through the web site, and encourage other people to use the same tags. Thus far, results have been generally positive and have required a moderate amount of work.

We expect the RBMS News Editor to join the Twitter and Facebook group so that he can disseminate news through these resources as well as on the website itself.

At this point, we wish to ask the Publications Committee and Web Team what they think of our continued experimentation with these social media tools. Should we continue? Should we add additional services? Should we transmit the web team model for social media to other parts of the Section?

F. Posting Minutes to RBMS.INFO:

In response to the Exec Committee’s request for the Web team to come up with a mechanism for getting each Committee's agendas and minutes on the RBMS website, the team experimented with converting and posting committee minutes. It was agreed by Exec to include official, finalized Exec. minutes only. Neither agendas nor draft or un-approved minutes will be included. (Exec. saw ALAConnect as a good location in which to share agendas and draft minutes, should a committee so desire.) Current RBMS Secretary Kate Moriarty volunteered to help develop the procedure to post Exec. minutes to the website. Kate has continued her website training and will update the Executive Committee page by Midwinter 2011. She will continue to work with James Ascher and Christopher Thomas Smith, as their availability permits, on posting RBMS committee minutes to the designated minutes page: http://www.rbms.info/committees/minutes/minutes.html.

G. Web Team Scope and Meetings:

The Web Team works under the auspices of the Publications Committee, as a subcommittee. The Team supports the Publications Committee’s current review of its own name and charge, which might affect the scope and structure of the Team. The Web Team has accomplished substantial goals with its current editor-liaison structure and the scope of its work continues to expand. It has been noted that we have appointed liaisons without Exec oversight and without channels for formal recognition. We continue to explore what the scope of the Team should be, what sorts of meetings we need, and how we can best achieve transparency within the Section.

Because of the considerable business involved with accomplishing its goals, the Team has been meeting at an informal lunch at ALA Annual and Midwinter in addition to keeping each other informed via email. The team expects to experiment with a virtual meeting, via Dim Dim, which ACRL supports, prior to ALA Midwinter 2011.

III. New Projects

A. Web Survey:

The RBMS Web Team conducted a survey of RBMS members and others who use the RBMS website about their needs for and uses of the website. The survey was open for four weeks (from 26 August through 24 September 2010) and received 95 responses. The responses highlight three areas for improvement of the website: more regularly updated and additional content, a simplified navigational structure, and an updated site design. A separate report on the website survey, submitted to the Web Team and Publications Committee for the ALA Midwinter 2011 meeting, offers more detailed information on the responses received as well as analysis and recommendations.

B. 2010 Preconference Documentation:

A page documenting the 2010 Preconference was created, which includes all available audio and video files from sessions, four photographs, and any available slides or handouts supplied by presenters. Permission to post all four photographs was obtained from each person pictured and from the photographer as a part of the webpage creation process. Permission to post audio and video files of sessions had already been obtained by the Preconference Planning Committee. In a related project, the Publications Committee is investigating whether the permissions gathering process for Preconference photographs can be streamlined in the future.

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