Meeting Minutes May 8, 2009

1st part of meeting – all - 45 minutes


Roll Call
Troy Brown (IL), Tom Ceresini (LYRASIS), Steve Gregory (CO), Kathleen Krause-Thompson (TX), Christine Kreger (CO), Jeff Humphrey (INCOLSA), Sonya Norris (MI), Bev Obert (IL), Susan Fipps (INCOLSA’s Head of Information Services), minutes by Justine Shaffner (Collaborative Coordinator)


Approve 4/9 Joint Project Coordinators/Tech Group Meeting Minutes
There were no corrections or objections so the minutes are approved.


Status of Plinkit 2.0 work – Gregory
Enfold is about 37% done with the project.  They think it’ll take 30-50 hours for recurring events for the calendar and Gregory and Hanning agreed we should do this.  This is more than the estimated hours but other parts of the project are ahead of schedule, so this probably/hopefully won’t mean the project will take more hours than originally estimated.  Gregory thanked everyone for getting back to Enfold quickly on all their questions. 

Krause-Thompson asked if it’s OK to respond by next Thursday re TX’s migrated sites.  Gregory said we told Mario Perez to expect them from TX by next Wednesday, so Krause-Thompson will email Perez to double check that Thursday will be OK.

a) User’s Manual – Ceresini and Kreger
(actually discussed during Other Business and other parts of the meeting) Kreger said she trained/traveled all week so just got started yesterday playing with the site Hanning set up for her, but it looks like it won’t be a huge update, more like a few word changes, page numbers, minor processes…  She’s about a tenth of the way though reviewing it.  Ceresini thanked Kreger for getting this set up and starting on it.  He’ll get a chance to start it next week and mentioned looking into the 508 compliance section in the text (see SOW for Skins item “c”).  He added that if anyone has anything they want to see in there or have fixed, please send to it to Kreger and him.


SOW for Skins – Troy
a) Update
b) Which skins available for Plone 3.0 should we clean up and implement for our use?
Brown has just received three skins ratings and those are all over the map.  It’s hard to get anything from these ratings, so please look at the themes and respond.  Right now he has five potential skins and we want to get it down to three.  Brown will resend spreadsheet (done) to prod everyone to send him their ratings.  Gregory said he admits he’s been busy with other stuff, so would appreciate Brown resending the spreadsheet.  Brown said the idea is not to exactly implement these skins but rather to create something with a similar look and feel.

c) Test the usability of the Plinkit websites and run a 508 compliancy check on them after Enfold’s done)
Brown said Plone as a platform has good 508 compliancy – our sites have problems when people don’t tag images properly.  Obert thinks we should include this in the documentation.  Ceresini will make a note for the documentation revision (User’s Manual) that we cover the tagging images issue and 508 compliancy.


Update on potential new members
IA – Shaffner emailed Iowa State Librarian, Mary Wegner on 4/23 re having a teleconference on how we could work together (since their website hosting service, PLOW, uses PLONE too) with Wegner, her IT person, Hanning, Duncan, Gregory and Shaffner, but she hasn’t heard back yet.  Duncan sees Wegner at BCR Board meetings so if we’ve heard nothing before then, Shaffner will ask him to ask Wegner about this.

Southeastern Massachusetts Regional Library System (SEMRLS) – Hanning, Duncan, Cindy Roach (Regional Administrator, SEMRLS), Kathy Lussier (Assistant Administrator for Technology, SEMRLS) and Shaffner had a teleconference on 4/29 re offering Plinkit to their academic, public, school and special libraries in 86 communities.  They are very interested but also mentioned that politically they may need to at least talk to the Central MA Regional Library System (who had talked to us, but chose Jazkarta to create their own website hosting service).  Shaffner will check in with them at the end of June if she hasn’t heard anything from them.


Status reports from each state
IL – Obert said Brown’s been busy working with the template and Enfold.  Obert is setting up a meeting for all their project coordinators and trainers for the end of May.  She’ll be updating them on all things Plinkit.  Gilman-Danforth District Library in Lincoln Trail Libraries System will be joining soon.  Brown did an advanced training on adding external content to their sites (e.g. embedding Flickr photos and YouTube videos in a page).  He said it’s good to do this training in a classroom setting as you can point out pitfalls to watch out for.  The training took about 2.5 hours, but included information on copyright issues, Creative Commons etc.  Even without the non-Plinkit specific training, trying to squeeze the training into one hour would be hard. 

Gregory asked if these trainings would be shareable.  Brown said that was the intent, but for the first one he didn’t have a chance as he was working out bugs in the training.  He hopes to make videos on each topic to eventually share at Plinkit.org as webcasts.  But Hanning may not like it much as he’s modified the original HTML a lot.  IL gives their libraries lots of leeway as they get a management account – they are only supposed to use it for easy stuff like changing colors, but he posts .zmi step by step instructions.  People have messed up stuff in Editor mode and one person screwed up the dates in .zmi but noticed right away when their home page didn’t load so Brown was able to Undo it immediately (three cheers for Undo - great feature!  Gregory said yes, when it works right – you have to catch it right away).  Brown’s never had to restore anything from a previous night’s backup.  Obert said he gives his users more leeway that Rolling Plains does.  Brown could let people edit the webcasts a bit so they’d still be usable for Project Coordinators who don’t give as many permissions to their users as he does.  He has modified templates quite a bit.

INCOLSA – Humphrey said they are working with the three pilot libraries and the rest will come on after the upgrade.  He gave a talk at their conference and many people were interested.  Fipps is attending as she is new to her position so is trying to learn all the technical stuff that’s going on at INCOLSA.

CO – Kreger said she’s getting ready to launch two websites this month and has three or four cued up to start right after the migration.  She trained Ouray this week and also did some refresher training for three other libraries while traveling since she was out their way.

TX – Krause-Thompson said they haven’t done any new sites lately.  They recently upgraded the storage on their server, which is great, and an upgrade of a redundant fiber pass will be done this weekend.  Ceresini asked if there is anywhere at the website where we have information about RAM used, operating systems used etc. as it’d be helpful for newbies.  Gregory’s standard for CO’s Plinkit 2.0 server is posted…  Gregory said we should all send this info to Shaffner to post.  Gregory will email the listserv with all the specs we’d like from them and asking for everyone to send this information to Shaffner.  He said you can leave details out if you aren’t sure about them or they are too hard to get.  Brown said don’t forget about instances and zero cluster – it’s not just the hardware specifications that will be helpful.

MI – Norris said they are still in the bid process, but she is doing presentations.  She did one recently for a rural libraries crowd that was standing room only and she told them they’d put a call out in the Fall asking for libraries that want to participate.  They modified Obert’s brochure for MI and it worked great!

LYRASIS – Ceresini said he had nothing new to report.  He’s drawing up a business plan/proposal for DE and PA to consider and for his organization to approve.  LYRASIS is the result of the merger between PALINET and SOLINET.  They are also having serious negotiations with NELINET who may merge with them this summer.  At next week’s Steering Committee meeting Yurcaba will be discussing with that group how all these mergers affect their Plinkit membership.

NEBASE, OR, VA – No attendees so no reports.

Gregory said he won’t be at the June meeting and Obert will only be at the first part of the meeting.

Gregory said he’d ask Hanning to run the Tech Group meeting next month.

Norris needed to leave. 


Innovative things done by states – add to website
Nothing to report.


Other Business
See a) User’s Manual


Next Meeting – June 12, 2009 Friday – Still at noon Eastern Time, 11 am Central Time, 10 am Mountain Time and 9 am Pacific Time (in July the meeting time will be ½ hour earlier – 11:30am ET, 10:30am CT, 9:30am MT and 8:30am PT)


2nd part of meeting – Technical Group Discussion – 45 minutes