NASIG Newsletter

ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS COMMITTEE
Anna Creech, Chair and Dalene Hawthorne, Co-Chair
 
Committee members: Abigail Bordeaux, Jennifer Duncan, Eric Elmore, Tony Goodwyn, Tonia Graves, Jennifer Lang, Jonathan David Makepeace, Jia Mi, and Wendy Robertson; Board Liaison: Katy Ginanni

CONTINUING/NEW ACTIVITIES
Website:

• Jennifer L. continues to maintain the online photo album. Jennifer D. and Abigail successfully moved the Jobs section to a WordPress blog. Anna has updated the web pages regularly and has been involved in supporting several projects from other committees. 
• Anna coordinated the purchase of the nasig.net domain name and hosting services via SiteGround for setting up a Moodle installation to be used at the annual conference. 
• A one year subscription to SurveyMonkey was also purchased for the purposes of creating membership surveys and post-conference feedback forms. 
• Anna and Abigail both worked with the task force collecting and evaluating RFP responses from ISPs and other vendors in response to the board’s decision to look for companies who can support the growing needs of the organization.

Lists:

• Dalene, Wendy, Jennifer L., Tonia, Jia, and Jonathan have all been rotating the monitoring of the listservs.  The list managers also handle any inquiries from NASIG members, monitor the spam inbox, and resolve bounces from committee lists.
• Dalene adds new NASIG members, creates new committee lists, updates committee list membership, and updates forwarding email addresses.
• D&D provided lists of active and inactive members after the membership renewal.  Dalene used these lists to update NASIG-L.  Dalene is still working to remove mostly out-of-date e-mail addresses from NASIG-L.

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

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

• The Moodle installation will provide options for continuing discussions from conference sessions, and will more easily facilitate the distribution of handouts and other presentation material.
• SurveyMonkey will make it easier to create feedback channels for the membership.

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

• A new host that meets the needs outlined in the RFP will allow NASIG to transition into Web/Library 2.0 models of communication and information organization, as well as provide better tools for managing older technologies such as the listserv.

STATISTICAL INFORMATION
Website (May 2006 – April 2007):

• Average hits on the site per month: 222,473 / home page: 4,770
• Average page views per month: 99,546
• Average visitor sessions per month: 43,480
• Average one-time visitors per month: 5,940
• Average returning visitors per month: 3,010

Full details - http://nasig.org/statistics/

Lists: 

• 41 committee lists: 29 active
• 878 current subscribers to NASIG-L
• 37 active forwarding addresses

ACTION(S) REQUIRED BY BOARD 
None at this time.

QUESTIONS FOR BOARD
None at this time.
 
RECOMMENDATIONS TO BOARD

• It is possible to have the committee listservs set up so that e-mail attachments can be used by the committees.  There is no additional charge for this, but it will require bee.net to move our listservs to another server.  Dalene recommends that we ask bee.net to make this change for the convenience of the committee members.
• Dalene recommends that we change the policy that states that only committee members can be added to the committee listservs and that other NASIG members that are assisting the committees may be added to the committee listservs with the president’s approval.

[Ed. note: Highlights from a report submitted for the fall Executive Board meeting.]

ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS COMMITTEE
Anna Creech and Dalene Hawthorne, Co-Chairs 

List manager Dalene Hawthorne is revising the policy for postings to NASIG-L.  The revision comes in response to the Executive Board’s request to broaden the scope of the list, which has historically included only information directly related to NASIG.  The board wants to allow postings of potential interest to members, such as announcements of serials-related events outside of NASIG. 

In response to a question from ECC on non-committee members and committee lists, the board confirmed that only committee members should be included on committee listservs.  Non-committee members who need to communicate with a committee should do so through committee chairs. 

The committee worked with NASIG’s ISP Bee.net to provide access to online conference handouts posted in the members-only area of NASIGWeb to non-members who attended the conference.  The board will decide on a policy for next year’s conference handouts. 

At the request of President Denise Novak and Vice President Char Simser, ECC members Abigail Bordeaux and Anna Creech inventoried and weeded files from NASIGWeb’s root directory.  Paper copies of weeded files were sent to the Archivist. 

ECC reported that since the beginning of May, NASIGWeb has received a total of 1,092,003 hits averaging 7,137 per day. 

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.