Committee Reports

Communications Committee Progress Report

Business Meeting, May 22, 2006

Prepared by Emily Okada & Suzanne Mudge

 

Communications Committee members for 2005/2006 were Emily Okada & Suzanne Mudge, co-chairs, Kirby Cheng, Angela Courtney, and Emma Dederick.

 

Although the committee never met as a full group, headway was made to fulfill three charges:

1) revive and post two issues of InULA Notes on the InULA website this year; 2) review and clarify guidelines for adding and taking people off InULA-L; and 3) Address issues regarding the InULA website, particularly updating annual information and archiving past documents.

 

A goal with all of these projects has been to document procedures and decisions with the hope that future Communications Committee members will not have to revisit the same issues every year. With this goal in mind, Emily Okada & Suzanne Mudge have volunteered to continue as co-chairs for one more year to test documentation and procedures for InULA Notes and the soon-to-be redesigned website.

 

InULA Notes:

We published one issue of InULA Notes.  The gathering of articles and the electronic posting of this first issue helped to identify what procedures need to be established and documented.  A second issue is in the works and should be posted by mid-June.  A priority for the coming year will be to develop and document efficient procedures.  A major focus of the committee will be to determine how to decrease the time it takes to electronically distribute and archive each issue.

 

InULA List-serv:

With the help of Jo McClamroch, treasurer, and Emma Dederick, Communications Committee member, we managed to update InULA-L. 

 

InULA-L postings are limited to INULA business and other issues directly related to the organization.  The need for a more free-form issues discussion forum was expressed by InULA members: a proposal was forwarded to the Board to investigate the feasibility of sponsoring such a list-serv.

 

Website:

In the fall, the committee met to review the status of InULA's website— with an eye toward overall site design and maintenance issues. At Erica Dowell's suggestion, and with Board approval, the committee enlisted the aid of a SLIS student, Travis Ennis, to create a site redesign proposal, as part of a SLIS class project. The focus of the redesign was to specifically improve the overall look of the site and create a consistent and simplified internal directory structure to make both updating the site and archiving past documents easier.   

 

The resulting site redesign was approved by the Board in April and the work is currently underway. Travis is being paid an honorarium of $400.00 to specifically: 1) complete the InULA website redesign, with full functionality; 2) fix broken links, and update current content; 3) create a directory called "previous" to allow people to access the current (old) site during the transition; 4) upload and test the redesigned site; 5) create documentation that includes an outline of the new directory structure, guidelines for updating the site and archiving documents annually, and guidelines for updating and archiving InULA NOTES; and 6) if time allows, begin the actual process to archive yearly documents and InULA NOTES.

Travis will finish the work by mid-June and the committee will send out a notice to the membership when the new site is ready. It will, however, take time to complete clean up and archiving of old documents. Committee members will continue this work and/or enlist the aid of additional InULA volunteers, as needed.