NASIG Newsletter

ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS COMMITTEE
Anna Creech and Emily McElroy, Co-Chairs

Committee Members:  Dalene Hawthorne (Emporia State University), Kitti Canepi (Southern Illinois University), Jim Viskochil (Mount Sinai Medical Library) resigned in January 2006, Abigail Bordeaux (Binghamton University), Jennifer Duncan (Utah State University), Eric Elmore (Sam Houston State University), Jennifer Lang (Princeton University), Jia Mia (College of New Jersey), Ruth Richardson Scales (Guilford College) resigned in February 2006, Laura Sheble (Wayne State University) resigned in July 2005, Shannon Shi (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), William Walsh (Georgia State University), Margaret Willingham (EBSCO), Mary Page (Board Liaison), Stephanie Schmitt (Consultant).

ECC was sad to hear the news of Ruth Richardson Scales’s death.  Ruth had been an active participant of ECC for several terms. 

CONTINUING/NEW ACTIVITIES

WEBSITE

• Jennifer Lang continues to maintain the online photo album.  Jennifer Duncan and Abigail Bordeaux are working on the transition to the new Jobs section.  Anna Creech has updated the web pages regularly and has been involved in supporting several projects from other projects.
• Abigail Bordeaux coordinated with Bee.net and Anna Creech to set up an instance of WordPress to be used to replace the previously hand-coded Jobs pages.  The WordPress program makes it easier to create and organize categories of job types, as well as automatically generating an RSS feed to make keeping up to date with new posts much easier.  http://jobs.nasig.org/ will go live in May 2006.  This provided a template for the Anna and Bee.net to set up another instance of WordPress to be used for the conference blog.  http://blog.nasig.net/ is live and ready to be used.
• Anna has used a Blogger blog to update the News section of the website.  She also set up a Blogger blog for the NASIG President to use while at UKSG.  Both of these are hosted on the nasig.org website, but the editing interface is done through Blogger.  Since they are relatively small projects, it made more sense to go that route rather than set up more instances of WordPress, which is really far more robust than what is needed.
• In addition, per the request of PPC, Anna has used an RSS feed generator called ListGarden to post NASIG Publicist approved items about the upcoming conference.  The feed has been publicized by posting an RSS button on the main conference page and making the feed discoverable by RSS enabled web browsers.

LISTS

• Emily McElroy, Dalene Hawthorne and Kitti Canepi add new NASIG members to NASIG-L, and moderate all NASIG-L messages.  The list managers also handle any inquiries from NASIG members and resolve bounces from committee lists.  Emily McElroy and now Dalene Hawthorne create new committee lists, update committee list membership, and update forwarding email addresses.
• In June 2005, Emily McElroy updated all committee list archives to the present year.  This is now an annual process once the new committee lists have been created.  All archive passwords were updated.  This will also become an annual process continued by Dalene Hawthorne.
• In April 2006, Mary Page gave permission to Emily McElroy to remove inactive members for 2004 and 2005 from NASIG-L.  D&D should begin sending any reactivated members to Dalene Hawthorne.
• Additional monitoring of bounced messages was undertaken.  Efforts were made to contact individuals and to resolve any problems before removal from NASIG-L.  Many of these problem bounces were inactive members of NASIG-L.  ECC will continue monitoring bounced messages and report unusual problems to individuals and attempt to contact them before removing them from NASIG-L if the problems persist more than a month.

COMPLETED ACTIVITIES
Many completed activities are now ongoing and included in the above section.

ACTIVITIES THAT SUPPORT THE NASIG STRATEGIC PLAN
Stimulate diverse communication channels:

• Blogs have been created to provide jobs information, the NASIG president to report from UKSG, and to update the News section on the website.  Most importantly, a blog was created for the 2006 Conference.
• RSS feed generator was installed on the conference website

Define options for using technology and employing support necessary to avoid volunteer burnout:

• Additional list managers were added.  A rotating schedule of a primary list manager with appropriate back-up support was added.  ECC still finds that moderating the lists requires a commitment to monitor email on weekends and evenings.  ECC asks for consideration in any time sensitive emails that need to be sent outside regular work hours.

STATISTICAL INFORMATION
Website: None of the web statistics are available for 05/06, but Anna will be working with Bee.net to retrieve them soon and posting them on the website for the membership to view.  In addition, we are keeping track of the conference blog use.

Lists: 41 committee lists: 32 active and 3 new lists.
987 current subscribers to NASIG-L
37 active forwarding addresses

ACTION(S) REQUIRED BY BOARD

BOARD ACTION REQUESTED
The Board and the technology planning folks should reconsider if a FrontPage website is still viable.  The current webspinner does not use FrontPage, and several web persons for the committees do not use it either.  Without some sort of imposed standardization across all sections of the website, there is no longer a need for a common web page creation program.   Moving to a UNIX server instead of a Windows server would also fix some of the problems encountered with FTP and password protected directories.  In addition, a site-wide clean-up of old files and restructuring is greatly needed.

BOARD ACTION REQUESTED
The brochures have been updated to reflect the change in membership dues.  However, the text in the English, Spanish, and French brochures needs to be revamped.  ECC and the Translators Resource Team are waiting on the new text from whomever has been charged with writing it.

BOARD ACTION REQUESTED
ECC is awaiting direction from the board on updating the annual calendar to reflect the change from June to May conferences.