ALA Web Advisory Committee

Posted by Linda W. Braun

Today I attended my first meeting of the “big” ALA Web Advisory Committee. (I am the YALSA rep. to the Committee.) One of the things that was discussed was that YALSA is the first ALA Division to be using blog software hosted on the ALA server. Other Divisions have blogs but we are the first to have the blog integrated into the ALA structure. ALA staff members did mention that other Divisions could do the same thing.

We also talked about ALA’s Online Communities. ALA staff is waiting to announce the Communities to the larger ALA world until the larger divisions are integrated fully into the Community environment.

There was a presentation from ALA publications about the different electronic publications that exist or are in the works. There is a new enewsletter for subscribers to American Libraries (if you don’t want to get the enewsletter you need to opt-out.) Booklist is going to be available online via subscription and there are several books that are being revised that will have online versions. I hadn’t realized that text chapters are available for download from some third party vendors. I’ll have to check that out.

American Libraries, ACRL, and HRDR are working on an online career center. It will allow employers to post job ads and employees to post resumes. (That’s just some of what will be available.) It sounds like the resource will be ALA’s version of Monster.com. Not a bad thing to have access to.

Sitting through the meeting it seemed to me that past mistakes have been taken to heart. It sounds like there is a good process in place for ALA to use to determine website needs and how to handle those needs. It also seems like they are very aware of the amount of testing that is needed in order to achieve success.