Cross-posted with Future Ready 365.

SLA isn’t yet Future Ready, so I am doing something about it. This site is the first live website to use SLA’s new web hosting service and newly designed theme for WordPress!

For many years, our unit websites have been disparate in content, design, and functionality. Some sites are coded “old school” with plain HTML, some use ColdFusion, some ASP or PHP, and some are externally hosted. They can’t effectively exchange data with Headquarters (or each other) and, to be honest, many have seen better days. At first glance, you would hardly know they were units of the same organization!

Operation Vitality*

SLA will revitalize its website community as “Operation Vitality” swings into high gear this year.

“Operation Vitality” has five objectives:

1. Provide a stable and modern website hosting service to all chapters, divisions, and caucuses;
2. Ensure the service is affordable and cost effective for the Association;
3. Design a brand-compliant template for all units to use;
4. Promote a common content management system we can all use, understand and build upon; and
5. Rebuild the community for SLA’s webmasters.

I ran for the Board of Directors on a Leadership, Volunteers and Technology platform and “Operation Vitality” sits at the intersection of these three themes. This will be my main focus during my last year on the Board.

New Hosting Service

The SLA staff has made tremendous strides towards establishing a new web hosting service for the units and 2011 will be the year we convert to a common content management system and promote a common look and feel.

• SLA has partnered with award-winning web host provider HostGator;
• WordPress will be promoted as the content management system of choice; and
• A professional WordPress theme has been designed specifically for SLA units and will be included as part of a new web hosting service.

There will be a cost for the new service, $40 per year, which includes a fully functioning WordPress install with the SLA Theme, 24/7 technical support provided by HostGator, email accounts, MySQL databases, FTP Accounts, an easy to use and flexible Control Panel, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. For the real web gurus out there, advanced features will also include CGI, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python, Curl, CPAN, GD Library, Image Magick, SSH Access and Cron Job Scheduling.

The Plan

In late 2010 a set of units who self-identified as early adopters started using the new service. Based on the feedback from this pilot, the service and the WordPress theme will be adjusted and rolled out to the whole Association in early 2011. The goal is to have all SLA units who are currently hosted by SLA converted to the new service by December 2011. Units who have pursued their own hosting are encouraged to rejoin.

The Team

A large project like “Operation Vitality” requires the energy of a dedicated and talented group of people. Volunteer “Super Admins” and staff members will be available to answer WordPress-related questions and provide guidance to units as they join the new service:

• Amy Buckland
• Michelle Dollinger
• Nicole Engard
• Britta Jessen Charbonneau
• Daniel Lee
• Kendra Levine
• Heather Ritchie
• Margaret Smith
• Linda Broussard (SLA’s Chief Administrative Officer)
• Jeff Leach (SLA’s Director, Marketing)
• Quan O. Logan (SLA’s Chief Technology Officer)

Are You Ready?

Today is the official launch of this project at Leadership Summit in Washington, DC. I will present details of the new service (along with a live demo of some of its features) to SLA’s leadership and will also invite units to join the second round of early adopters.

I am very excited to see what web-based innovations the association will realize when we are all finally rowing in the same direction. If your unit is ready to make the switch, or if you have any questions or comments, contact me.

Daniel P. Lee

Director, 2009-2011

Email: danielplee at sympatico.ca

Office: (416) 644-7000

Twitter: @yankeeincanada

Appendix – Early Adopters (First Round)

• Florida & Caribbean
• Illinois
• New York
• Oregon
• Philadelphia
• Silicon Valley
• Toronto
• Washington, DC
• Western Canada
• Academic
• Business and Finance
• Competitive Intelligence
• Leadership and Management Division
• Legal
• Science-Technology
• Transportation

* I chose “Operation Vitality” as the nickname/codename for this project because I wanted to inject a “a healthy capacity for vigorous activity” into our webmaster community and because I was doing things slightly under the radar to build support from the ground up.

Introduction to Social Media for Organizations

Bring your organization up to date by learning how to develop a social media plan, taking into account its larger strategies and objectives. Learn about monitoring the web for mentions of your organization and conversations that are of interest, and joining in. Consider your organization’s key audiences or communities, where they are online and how to engage them. Learn about online community building, and measurement that is meaningful.

This is a full day introductory overview session with a focus on strategy and methods rather than specific tools or tactics.

Learning outcomes for participants:

• How social media efforts can fit into your organization’s existing strategies.
• How to monitor social networks for conversations about your organization and other topics that are of interest to you.
• How different audiences or communities have different levels of engagement online, and how to reach out to them.
• Planning your organization’s method for responding to queries and comments and engaging in conversations.
• Methods for online community building.
• Looking for measurement that is meaningful.

Prerequisite:
Participants are expected to have a basic knowledge of blogs, wikis, Facebook and Twitter.

Target Audience:
Management or executive level employees in library, non-profit and other organizations that want to start new social media engagements or improve existing engagements.

Marketing or PR staff in information-related organizations such as libraries who want a broader perspective on how their organizations can get involved in social media.

Registration is now open!

via Pew Internet

C106: Mobile Future

Mobile statistics

• U.S. Teen Mobile Report: Calling Yesterday, Texting Today, Using Apps Tomorrow (Nielsen)
• New tools coming for U of G course designers (University of Guelph)
• Mobile Applications: Preparing for the Appocalypse (Borrell Associates, Inc.)

C302: Value-Added Research

Media monitoring and content analysis links

• The Content Analysis Guidebook by Kimberly A. Neuendorf (Cleveland State University)
• Dow Jones Insight
• LexisNexis Analytics
• FPInfomart
• Newscan
• MediaVantage
• Cision
• Overtone
• DNA13
• Carma
• Interwoven
• MediaMiser
• ManyEyes
• Radian6
• Sysomos
• Media Analysis (The Pew Charitable Trusts)
• Content Analysis (Wikipedia)
• IABC Measurement Commons (Blog from the International Association of Business Communicators)
• Human Content Analysis vs. Software based Content Analysis (Media Tenor)
• 11 ways to visualize changes over time a guide (FlowingData)
• 9 ways to visualize proportions a guide (FlowingData)
• 7 basic rules for making charts and-graphs (FlowingData)
• Data visualization: Modern approaches (Smashing Magazine)

W15: From Media Monitoring to Media Insight (Pre-conference Workshop)

(October 24, 2010 / 9:00 AM–12:00 PM)

Media monitoring as we know it is evolving. Learn the latest methods, tools, and techniques used in the world of communications, politics and public affairs to extend your existing monitoring service with insight and analysis for better decision making. This hands-on workshop introduces you to simple and advanced tools you can use immediately. It includes a survey of the latest tools and applications and illustrates their use with real world products and services. This workshop will be of interest to competitive intelligence professionals and anyone looking to ramp up their media monitoring service and to impress their customers.

C106: Mobile Future

(October 25, 2010 / 4:15 PM–5:00 PM)

Co-presenting with Joe Murphy (Yale University) and Chad Mairn (St. Petersburg College).

What are some of the mobile programs currently in development? What are other organizations doing that libraries can learn from? Hear what our experienced and forward-thinking panel highlights and what we should be paying attention to in the next year to shape our plans for a mobile future. An interactive discussion of topics from the day will be included.

C302: Value-Added Research

(October 27, 2010 / 11:30 AM–12:15 PM)

Co-presenting with Amy Affelt (Compass Lexecon) and Qin Zhu (HP Labs Research Library).

Many corporate librarians use specialized clipping and alerting services to deliver value through a tangible, pragmatic information product. Daily information alerts that are tailored to individual requestors’ interests delight constituents on a daily basis, meeting their needs by playing an active, consistent role in their success. Affelt details how e-book readers such as the Amazon Kindle and the iPhone can help librarians quickly and easily look for, clip, and archive critical information, explore techniques for streamlining and organizing information through the use of these devices so that it can be delivered to requestors when and where it is needed and explains the process of integrating content from librarians’ e-book readers to requestors’ smartphones. Lee discusses going beyond media monitoring to provide insight and analysis. Zhu discusses discovery tools and processes used to put information into context.

Internet Librarian Advance Program

View the Internet Librarian Advance Program at http://www.infotodaycom/il2010/program.asp.

via Nielson

Infographic by the PPC Blog.com

via Plaid Creative

What will the re-tweeter do?  When a follower of @sla2010 posts a tweet with the hashtag #sla2010 in their tweet (probably best at the end of the tweet) that tweet will be posted to the @sla2010 account and circulated to all of @sla2010′s followers.  The username of the person who sent the original tweet will appear at the start of the message followed by a “:”.

At conference, there will be a 2 minute delay before tweets are re-tweeted.  This year twitter has been whitelisted the @sla2010 account which means there will be limits on how many tweets can be posted to the account.  Yay!

Re-tweeting is helpful for:

• segregating your #sla2010 tweet stream from your other streams
• sending broadcast messages (2 minute delay at conference) to all @sla2010 followers
• finding out what others at conference are doing, seeing, hearing, eating, drinking, etc. (Author’s note: this will be especially important in New Orleans!)
• asking questions and getting answers
• experiencing the conference virtually – check out the virtual conference component as well
• creating an archive of tweets for future or live analysis

This is an opt-in service.  Only your tweets with the hashtag (#sla2010) will be re-tweeted and you must be following sla2010 for it to work.  Also, tweets from protected accounts won’t be re-tweeted.

Using a number of tools out there, you can also follow the #sla2010 hashtag:

• via RSS
• search.twitter.com
• TweetDeck
• TweetChat
• Many others

The re-tweeter is brought to you by the SLA Innovation Laboratory!