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ajs17 edited this page Feb 8, 2021 · 46 revisions

2021-02-08

Executive Summary:

Asia launched as planned and without any issues. There have been few support requests and the stakeholders seem to be managing the content well on their own. The team is now focusing attention on the Mann and Olin/Uris launches. Four of our planned tasks to be completed by the end of January have been completed and three remain in progress.

Detailed Updates:

Completed:

  • Launch Asia: The new Asia site launched on 1/19 as planned. Stakeholders are managing content well without making many mistakes or needing much support.
  • Meet with Mann, Olin, and Asia stakeholders for progress update: All stakeholders are currently up-to-date on progress as everyone is working closely on final updates.
  • Update migrated Olin/Uris, Asia, and Mann Content: All known content has migrated and being managed in Wordpress.
  • Feature Development: staff profiles: The application is now in CULU (unified) theme. Developers continue to make a few enhancements and then will switch Asia to it. Nick will work with Tobi to clean up Mann's staff profiles. Placeholder data is in place for Olin/Uris.

In progress:

  • Begin development of training materials for creation and distribution of newsletters using Mailster: Kevin plans to address this this month.
  • Training session for all unit stakeholders - review most common mistakes and how to fix: This has not been set up yet, and may not be necessary yet and content managers seem to be doing well on their own, needing little support and not making many errors.
  • News feeds into sites: This is still in progress. Functionality is there (both Mann and Olin/Uris will use out-of-the-box blog functionality), just need to add content.

The updated project timeline can be found at: https://cornell.box.com/s/nahzn46j4ni1xr4tb17g6kbbhnforb8n

2021-01-11

Executive Summary:

We are currently still on schedule to launch Asia next week (that starts January 18). All major feature development work is done with a handful of small tasks that can be implemented once stakeholders finish all content updates. Another meeting will be held this week to check progress and continue training, but at present there are no blockers to launch. The complete and up-to-date pre-launch "checklist" is at https://github.com/cul-it/uls/issues/935 .

Detailed Updates:

Completed:

  • Floormaps for remaining units if time allows: existing floormaps are in place and no others are planned right now.
  • Feature Development: Events: The infrastructure is in place and Asia's events are ready.
  • Review compliance workflow with Bonna and Simeon: Sara emailed "Unit Website Compliance Workflow" document to Bonna and Simeon on 1/12.

In progress:

  • Meet with Mann, Olin, and Asia stakeholders for progress update: A meeting for Asia is scheduled for this week. Tobi will arrange a similar meeting with Jessa for Olin/Uris.
  • Update migrated Olin/Uris, Asia, and Mann Content: For Asia, we are waiting for content updates from Jeff and Emily, which may also result in some additional development work. For Mann and Olin/Uris, Kevin will review again and training will be scheduled.
  • Feature Development: staff profiles: Manolo and Nick are finishing up work to filter by languages and collections, but the basic features are ready for launch. Accessibility has also been verfied.
  • News feeds into sites: Tobi met with Eveline for initial blog training and will follow up with them again as well as arrange similar training for Rob for Olin/Uris.

The following were moved ahead on the timeline as they are either more relevant to the near-future Mann and Olin/Uris launches or are simply tasks in which there is nothing to do currently, although that could change:

  • Training session for all unit stakeholders - review most common mistakes and how to fix: Training with Asia continues this week and Tobi will be arranging sessions with Mann and Olin/Uris staff soon.
  • Internal testing of Equipment, Events, and Spaces: No known work at this time, although we are hesitant to say it is done.
  • Floormaps training - stakeholders can build out features like photos and links: This will be done for Mann.
  • WWW usability research: to be started after launch of unit sites, possibly in a new project.

The updated project timeline can be found at: https://cornell.box.com/s/nahzn46j4ni1xr4tb17g6kbbhnforb8n

2020-12-08

Executive Summary:

In November, we completed five of seven tasks, while one remains in progress and one remains on the "back burner." The roadmap was adjusted to move three tasks ahead in the timeline and one task was tabled for the foreseeable future. We are on track for Asia to go live in January and for Mann and Olin/Uris to go live later in the first quarter 2021. An Asia go-live checklist is in place and effort is being focused on those tasks. The exact cutover date has yet to be decided with Asia.

The updated timeline can be found at: https://cornell.box.com/s/nahzn46j4ni1xr4tb17g6kbbhnforb8n

Detailed Updates:

November summary:

Feature Development: Events

  • A script is in place to automatically populate Localist with LibCal events and then populate the sites.
  • Wireframes are being created, but the initial implementation is in place.
  • There are very few events to display, even looking forward a year.
  • Met with stakeholders in Olin & Mann (Emily, Eveline and Rob) to review workflow and address concerns. Similar meetings in the coming weeks are planned with Elizabeth in Communications, Michelle Eastman and Suzette.

Feature Development: staff profiles

  • The team reviewed a working demo of the staff directory and profile card views, showing searching, sorting and faceting.
  • Work continues, including import images (a Distributor plugin issue), accessibility, and responsiveness work needed also.

Internal testing of Events

  • Ongoing testing with stakeholders is taking place as new features (such as staff profiles and events) are being developed.

Meeting with Asia stakeholders

  • Met with stakeholders late November, another meeting planned for mid-December and then again in early January when the exact cutover date will be determined.
  • Reviewed features, and Kevin is addressing their feature enhancement requests for staff profiles and events.
  • Asia may not have all content updates done in time for launch, but they confirm that this should not delay launch and can be completed after.
  • Kevin has a complete pre-launch checklist at: https://github.com/cul-it/uls/issues/935

News feeds into sites

  • Kevin, Sara and Tobi met to review Wordpress' blogging features and Tobi will begin entering Mann news, and then she will be able to train others.

Review compliance workflow with Danianne and Simeon

  • Sara will follow up on this.

Feature Development: Equipment & Spaces

  • Still on hold.

Related work:

  • Melissa is removing unit pages from the main site, having gotten approval from all unit heads.
  • We met to discuss future main site development and content management.

Roadmap updates:

Usability testing of Equipment, Events, and Spaces

  • The usability committee has not met in a while and the assumption is that nothing new will be done through the end fo the year. It was decided that this should be tabled for now and revisited in the first quarter next year.

Training session for all unit stakeholders - review most common mistakes and how to fix

  • Will move this ahead on the roadmap as there is not much reason to have this training now.

Begin development of training materials for creation and distribution of newsletters using Mailster

  • This is currently a requirement for Mann's launch.

December goals:

  • Floormaps for remaining units if time allows
  • Meet with Mann, Olin, and Asia stakeholders for progress update (Will meet with Jessa from Olin in December)
  • Update migrated Olin/Uris, Asia, and Mann Content
  • Usability testing of Equipment, Events, and Spaces
  • Internal testing of Equipment, Events, and Spaces
  • Floormaps training - stakeholders can build out features like photos and links
  • News feeds into sites

Kevin notes that other than Asia, no other site is asking for floormaps, so this may simply be addressed as needed going forward and we will otherwise redirect that effort toward things we know we need for launch.

2020-11-02

Executive Summary:

In October, we completed four tasks, with three still in progress, and the future timeline was adjusted to move five tasks ahead. (These are detailed below.) There were fewer pandemic related distractions this month, although a few competing projects (FOLIO's Bug Fest week in particular) took some effort away from unit web sites.

Overall, we are very confident that Asia can go live in January 2021 (meaning before the beginning of the Spring semester). For Mann and Olin/Uris, a more likely timeframe would be February or March, depending mainly on the following factors:

  • the effort around changing pandemic policies, particularly concerning spaces and equipment, and
  • whether we think we could go live with features that are not fully implemented and keep enhancing the sites afterward. (An example might be initially just linking out to a LibCal feature and afterward working on a more direct integration with our sites.)

As you can see, regardless of when we go live with the sites, we anticipate expending continued effort on the project well into 2021. We also discussed prioritizing work on spaces over equipment.

Detailed Updates:

Completed at end of October:

Meeting with Asia stakeholders:

  • We met again with Asia stakeholders and reviewed outstanding tasks. A lot of work has been done, and we feel we are comfortably on schedule with their site. Jeff and Emily are taking the lead on decisions and have given other stakeholders until the end of November to provide feedback. New feature enhancements around events were requested, and we will wait to implement those until after launch. We will be meeting with them again later in November.

Continued work on Custom Loop Elementor Widget:

  • Initial work is completed, with only ongoing maintenance needed as we develop the sites more.

Granular Elementor controls:

  • Kevin implemented a plugin, Manolo has reviewed it, so it is done and ready to be pushed out.

Feature Development: staff profiles:

  • Nick and Manolo have been making good progress on the staff profiles, scaffolding a Vue app, creating components for staff profile views as well as filtering based on multiple facets. They will have a demo soon.
  • This work spans multiple months, but we accomplished what we hoped to in October.

Still in progress:

Review compliance workflow with Danianne and Simeon:

  • Sara will reach out to Darcy to make sure she has fully reviewed it, and then it should be ready to be shared with Danianne and Simeon.

Begin development of training materials for creation and distribution of newsletters using Mailster:

  • Kevin will meet with Mann and O/U stakeholders.

Feature Development: Events:

  • Requirements and data sources are known.
  • Manolo will begin working on wireframes. The events display will be based on Mann's current approach.
  • Nick created a script to export data from LibCal to Localist, which is almost completed.
  • Tobi will arrange a meeting with stakeholders to go over the workflow.

Misc:

  • Unit pages on WWW: -- Melissa emailed the unit stakeholders listserv to let them know about taking down the unit library web pages that are linked from the main site Libraries list. -- The only response we are waiting for is from Jeff, all others gave their OK and most were happy about it actually. -- This will really help with maintenance and duplication of content, especially around covid-related alerts.
  • Floormaps training: will do at the same time as general training session mentioned above.
  • Manolo incorporated the hours display into CULU theme.
  • Jim created a new custom upstream and Manolo updated all sites with it.

Changes to roadmap:

  • Added to November: Meeting with Asia stakeholders
  • Moved ahead one month: -- Usability testing of Equipment, Events, and Spaces -- Internal testing of Equipment, Events, and Spaces -- Floormaps training - stakeholders can build out features like photos and links -- Training session for all unit stakeholders - review most common mistakes and how to fix -- News feeds into sites

The updated roadmap can be seen at: https://cornell.box.com/s/nahzn46j4ni1xr4tb17g6kbbhnforb8n .

November Goals:

  • Review compliance workflow with Danianne and Simeon
  • Begin development of training materials for creation and distribution of newsletters using Mailster
  • Feature Development: Events
  • Feature Development: staff profiles
  • Usability testing of Equipment, Events, and Spaces
  • Internal testing of Equipment, Events, and Spaces
  • Meeting with Asia stakeholders
  • Training session for all unit stakeholders - review most common mistakes and how to fix -- Asia in November -- All in December?
  • News feeds into sites

2020-10-01

Executive Summary:

We continued to make progress on five tasks that span multiple milestones, marking them as finished in the past months and extending them into the future now that we have a better sense of their scope:

  • Feature Development: Equipment
  • Feature Development: Events
  • Feature Development: Spaces
  • Feature Development: staff profiles
  • Granular Elementor controls

Meetings were held with Asia, Olin, and Mann stakeholders. The task for developing Mailster training materials was moved to October, and we have paused work for the foreseeable future on the following two tasks:

  • Usability testing on Law Timeline: This proved too difficult to do remotely and will be planned for a future on-site date.
  • Feature Development: Spaces: currently, there are too many unknowns about the future direction of spaces for us to move ahead with development.

Four tasks scheduled for completion in September are still in progress, with further updates below.

Outstanding issues and concerns:

  • Stakeholders have a new high-priority reactivation goal that will take time away from UWS: quiet study and research by appointment. Similar to what happened with Quiet Study, it was the top priority for roughly two weeks. Research by Appt (essentially appt’s to browse the stacks) will launch in some form the week of 10/5. Rare and distinctive collections at select locations will be offering this service soon as well, timeline for those is TBD.
  • We are somewhat hampered by the changing requirements, particularly around spaces and equipment, and to some extent events, as rapidly evolving reactivations plans are put into place.
  • Asia specific: At the time of the meeting in September, it seemed that Asia staff had not yet had time to review the development site and did not have feedback.

Detailed Updates:

Completed at end of September:

  • Feature Development: Spaces: Nick, Melissa, Kevin, Manolo and Jim were all involved to some extent in recent service reactivations, including many around spaces and seat reservations.
  • Feature Development: Equipment: Laptops will be made available in early October at Uris. All is done from Tom and Tobi's perpective, just waiting for OKU to reactivate on their website. All laptops are in Libcal currently. New laptops are coming in, and we need to prioritize these over other equipment. Other equipment availability TBD by Sara, and should just be a matter of turning them back on in Libcal.
  • Feature Development: Events: Nick and stakeholders agreed on data sources and management of events. Staff will enter events in Libcal only, which will be automatically fed to Localist and then fed into the unit sites automatically where they can be de-duplicated and published.
  • Feature Development: staff profiles: Continued development of displaying profiles and custom filters in Vue app as well as testing Wordpress Distributor plugin for publishing content across multiple sites.
  • Meet with Asia stakeholders: Productive overall, there is clean up work and content that Asia staff need to put together; still a decent amount of work on their part.
  • Meet with Olin stakeholders: Met with Jessa in August for Olin/Uris and will circle back to her when there is something to show around upcoming feature development.
  • Tobi: "The Mann stakeholder is happy."
  • Minor updates were made to the recommended book pages on the Math site.
  • September CULU accessibility review: 99.9% SiteImprove score.

Progress made on:

  • Usability testing on Law Timeline: Sabrina is still looking at it, Sara will check in with her.
  • Review compliance workflow with Danianne and Simeon: Sara will send a follow-up email to Darcy.
  • Granular Elementor controls: The support ticket Kevin filed with the vendor still hasn't even been approved after a month, so he is looking at different approaches. One alternative is the "widget manager" plugin, that he is now customizing, and Manolo and Nick are testing.
  • Continued work on Custom Loop Elementor Widget: Kevin is still working on it, but it is mostly maintenance at this point. When ready, he will need to add in loops for sites that aren't live yet.

New/Misc.:

  • For Math site, Henrik wants a new books feed similar to what is on PSL. Jim and Frances are working with Henrik and will hand off to Kevin when ready. Henrik wants to filter out computer science materials (multiple call number ranges), which is tricky.
  • The Mann hours display has been updated to focus on things that are open, instead of also listing what is closed (many). The hours plugin was also heavily refactored.

October Goals:

  • Feature Development: Equipment
  • Feature Development: Events
  • Feature Development: Spaces
  • Feature Development: staff profiles
  • Granular Elementor controls
  • Usability testing of Equipment, Events, and Spaces
  • Internal testing of Equipment, Events, and Spaces
  • Meet with Mann, Olin, and Asia stakeholders for progress update
  • Training session for all unit stakeholders - review most common mistakes and how to fix
  • News feeds into sites
  • Begin development of training materials for creation and distribution of newsletters using Mailster
  • Review compliance workflow with Danianne and SimeonContinued work on Custom Loop Elementor Widget

2020-08-04

Executive Summary:

In July, 4 of 9 tasks were completed, and progress was made on 5 tasks. As we look at the current state of the roadmap and consider a few anticipated disruptions, we are now concerned that the original deadline is at risk. The factors involved are:

  • There has been greater than expected complexity with feature development around equipment, events and spaces. Nothing is currently blocking, but the scope of the work is greater than initially expected.
  • Sara, Melissa, & Andy's time was pulled in July to finish the updates to the main CUL site around remote teaching/learning/research.
  • Nick's time will be less on the project as he is being pulled to work on LibCal seat reservations.
  • We anticipate disruptions around the semester start as developers respond to changing services and Sara, Andy, and Tobi have said their time on the project may go down to zero for a bit as they deal with beginning of semester planning.

We will continue the work in front of us, managing scope as we go, but finishing later if needed. Given that we are planning to implement FOLIO next Summer and people will be working on that starting early in 2021, this may mean that implementation work on the main site will have to be postponed until later in 2021. However, in the meantime, planning, usability testing, etc. can take place, and Darcy is already starting to plan for this.

Detailed Updates:

Completed in July:

  • Address Law Timeline Accessibility
    • Sabrina at Law is currently reviewing the timeline functionality. The project team will do an initial usability review and elevate it to the usability committee if we think it is necessary.
  • Meet with Mann, Olin, and Asia stakeholders for progress update
  • Rough draft on compliance workflow
    • Kevin made significant updates and Darcy joined the group to discuss the document, provide feedback and plan for how this will ultimately be implemented. With further revisions, we think this can be in a state to present to the sponsors later in August.
  • Granular Elementor controls
    • Kevin has identified a plugin he can modify to enable the role editing needed. He will continue to explore this in August.

Progress made on:

  • Feature Development: Equipment
    • Developers continue to work through scope and requirements. A group is meeting this week to discuss questions around use of LibCal and Voyager. There are also questions of the priority of this in the event that we do not loan physical items in the Fall. Perhaps this can help us mitigate our schedule slippage.
  • Feature Development: Events
    • Also continuing to work through scope and requirements, particularly around the use of various data sources (LibCal, CU Events and Localist). Stakeholders will review Nick's work this week.
  • Feature Development: Spaces
    • Manolo has created and demo'd wireframes of display and filtering options. Currently awaiting stakeholder review.
  • Feature Development: staff profiles
    • In a release planned for later this week, Manolo will have significant updates including the use of the Distributor plugin to populate content automatically across sites.
  • Begin development of training materials for creation and distribution of newsletters using Mailster
    • This task is mostly complete and can be closed out once Mann is up and running.

Other updates:

Plugins renewing:

  • WP-RSS:
    • SoN approved 2020-08-03
    • funding approved 2020-07-24
    • Meredith notified 2020-08-03
  • FacetWP:
    • SoN: Phil, 2020-08-03: "They’re making us do a web accessibility review of FacetWP, which is underway."
    • funding approved 2020-07-31
    • Meredith notified 2020-08-03 We had initial discussions about planning for work on the main site. Darcy is already thinking about creating one or more stakeholder groups to do begin planning, no development work would be done during this initial phase, which could happen this Fall.

Changes to roadmap:

The roadmap was updated to move ahead "Internal testing of Equipment, Events, and Spaces" and to extend tasks for equipment, events and spaces ahead two months more. "Training session for all unit stakeholders - review most common mistakes and how to fix" was also moved ahead, but it is thought that this change does not impact the deadline.

August goals:

  • (continue) Feature Development: Equipment
  • (continue) Feature Development: Events
  • (continue) Feature Development: Spaces
  • (continue) Feature Development: staff profiles
  • (continue) Begin development of training materials for creation and distribution of newsletters using Mailster
  • Granular Elementor controls
  • Meet with Mann, Olin, and Asia stakeholders for progress update
  • Usability testing on Law Timeline
  • Review compliance workflow with Danianne and Simeon

2020-07-14

Executive Summary:

We completed 2 of 13 tasks with progress made on 6 tasks and 5 tasks moved ahead in the roadmap to future milestones. The schedule has slipped a little due to outages that include vacations, illness and family care. Also both Nick and Kevin were pulled off the project to work on FOLIO and USDA respectively. The team is not alarmed yet and feels they can recover in the coming months, and we will be discussing strategies for protecting our ultimate deadline.v

Detailed updates:

Completed in June:

  • Continue migrating Asia Content - meet with Asia to review
    • Met with stakeholders to review migrated and reorganized content, which was received well. Jeff needs to fix broken links, and he has been updating a lot of content, so we will be giving him a deadline after which we will not migrate changes. We will meet with Asia again at the end of August.
  • Floormaps for remaining units if time allows
    • All units that previously had floor maps now have them. Fine Arts has a floor plan mocked up but not yet in Wordpress.

Progress made on:

  • Feature Development: Equipment

    • Manolo is working on wireframes.

  • Feature Development: Events

    • Nick continues gathering requirements and there are still significant unknowns.

  • Feature Development: Spaces

    • Nick is focusing on this for now as there are more robust requirements. Tobi has met with Wendy to iron out Olin/Uris requirements, room naming, etc.g

  • Begin development of training materials for creation and distribution of newsletters using Mailster

  • Rough draft on compliance workflow

    • Based on initial feedback, another revision has been completed and distributed to the team for feedback. Darcy has also been sent a copy.

  • Feature Development: staff profiles

Moved ahead on roadmap:

  • Granular Elementor controls
    • This is something that in past months we assumed would likely need to be pushed ahead because of Kevin's availability.
  • Review compliance workflow with Danianne and Simeon
  • Training session for all unit stakeholders - review most common mistakes and how to fix
    • Sara notes that this is not pressing as of July.
  • Internal testing of Equipment, Events, and Spaces
  • Address Law Timeline Accessibility

Kevin says that he should be able to put more time on UWS after a 7/22 USDA partners meeting.

July/August goals:

  • (continue) Feature Development: Equipment
  • (continue) Feature Development: Events
  • (continue) Feature Development: Spaces
  • Internal testing of Equipment, Events, and Spaces
  • Address Law Timeline Accessibility
  • Granular Elementor controls
  • Meet with Mann, Olin, and Asia stakeholders for progress update

2020-06-04

Executive summary:

We completed eight of our ten goals for May, including four of five goals moved forward into May from April. The two remaining goals are in progress, and it is not worrisome that one ("Continue migrating Asia Content - meet with Asia to review") has now been carried over twice: Kevin Kidwell and Tobi Hines are actively working to identify staff who can complete the work that our student workers (who are no longer available to us) were unable to finish, at which time we will schedule a meeting with stakeholders from Asia to review. One or two of our goals for June may need to be slid forward into July or beyond to account for Kevin's temporarily limited availability, but we are not concerned that this will jeopardize the overall project timeline. We have not identified any barriers to completing any of our other goals for June on time, so the project remains on schedule.

Detailed updates:

General updates:

  • Kevin will be able to give 50% to UWS in June. He will likely work fairly exclusively on USDA for the first half of the month and then focus on UWS in the latter half.

Completed in May:

  • Staff Profiles: address additional filters
  • Investigate Sassafras as a possibility to handle software availability
    • After much back-and-forth with CIT and the vendor, we now believe this will meet all of our requirements. Jessa agreed that Olin/Uris should also use this approach, and adopt the display that Mann uses. Nick has started to adapt the display accordingly.
  • Investigate options to address Newsletter; determined there was no need to switch from Mailster
  • Printer Friendly Pages
    • (Manolo notes that as the remaining units are developed, more changes may be needed.)
  • Feature Development: Equipment; Feature Development: Events; Feature Development: Spaces
    • Met initial goal of specifying requirements, development continues in coming months.
  • Met with Olin stakeholder to review dev site, confirm IA, go over some feature requirements
  • Feature Development: Equipment; requirements list completed and reviewed with dev team
  • Feature Development: Events; requirements list completed and reviewed with dev team
  • Feature Development: Spaces; requirements list completed and reviewed with dev team

Pre-June tasks remaining:

  • Continue migrating Asia Content - meet with Asia to review
    • Students are now gone and there is still content to migrate. Kevin and Tobi are working together to find staff to continue this work.
  • Floormaps for remaining units if time allows

Upcoming June tasks:

  • Meet with Asia stakeholders for progress update
  • Review and finalize Mann homepage content
  • Feature Development: Equipment; Feature Development: Events; Feature Development: Spaces; Internal testing of Equipment, Events, and Spaces
    • We will likely next turn to prototyping either spaces or equipment. The approach will be for content managers to edit content on unit sites then use the "Distributor" Wordpress plugin to push this updates to a central site. Current the central site is a generic Wordpress instance, but eventually it will be the migrated main/WWW site.
  • Granular Elementor controls
    • This may have to be shifted forward in the timeline to account for Kevin's availability.
  • Address Law Timeline Accessibility
    • Shifted from a previous month in the timeline.
  • Begin development of training materials for creation and distribution of newsletters using Mailster.
  • Rough draft on compliance workflow
    • A current draft is approximately 2/3 completed.
  • Feature Development: staff profiles
    • It was decided that the same distributed content management planned for space, equipment, etc., would also apply to staff profiles, so this is a new enhancement that has been added to the timeline.

2020-05-14

Executive summary:

We completed 10 of 15 of our goals for April, including all goals moved forward into April from March. All of the remaining goals are in progress and on pace to be completed by the end of the month. We have not identified any barriers to completing any of our other goals for May on time, so the project remains on schedule.

Detailed updates:

General/misc:

  • In April, Kevin went to 80% on USDA, 20% on UWS to deal with high-priority work on USDA for 4-6 weeks (estimated). Most of his 20% is supervising students, and his other work will shift into the future, and we are confident this will not significantly delay the ultimate project end date.
  • Nick joined the team in April. In separate meetings, Kevin, Manolo and I oriented him to the project. He is immediately investigating Sassafrass, getting his development environment set up and acclimating to Wordpress and the theme we are using ("CULU" using Elementor).

April goals completed:

  • Optimize Course Reserves for better performance/ Implement new course reserves:
  • Meet with Mann & Olin stakeholders for progress update
  • Mann & Olin Floormaps
  • Fine Arts and Asia Floormaps
  • Finish migrating Olin/Uris & Mann Content
  • Begin migrating Asia content if IA is agreed upon
    • Currently four students are working on this until 5/20. One student started, another joined once Olin/Uris content migration was completed, and two more students who finished work on Makerspace joined the effort. (Asia's content is quite large and complex compared to other unit sites.)
  • Compliance work - begin thinking about how we handle continuing to meet compliance, how do IT & unit stakeholders work together? Rough draft on compliance workflow complete and needs to be reviewed by Andy/Adam/Sara.
  • Investigate options to address Newsletter - should we switch from Mailster? Current option is working well for ILR and should meet Mann needs as well. Will continue with current option unless issues arise going forward.
  • Accessibility check, double-check all sites
    • Africana 99.3
    • Asia 94.5
    • Engineering 96.8
    • Finearts 97.6
    • ILR 97.5
    • Management 98.8
    • Law 98.4
    • Annex 99.2
    • Mann 97.5
    • Math 99.4
    • Music 98.8
    • OlinUris 99.8
    • PSL 98.1
    • Rare 98.3
    • Hotel 99.2
    • Vet 99.3

April goals still in progress:

  • Address Law Timeline Accessibility: A plugin has been identified that we think can be made accessible. The Technology Risk Assessment process was completed and a Statement of Need submitted to CIT, waiting for their review. (This is not currently a blocking issue.)
  • Staff Profiles: address additional filters
    • Tobi and Manolo are working through this.
  • Investigate Sassafrass as a possibility to handle software availability
    • Nick has noted that this service is not well documented. He is working with both CIT and directly with the vendor setting up appropriate account credentials and exploring functionality.
  • Meet with Asia to review content
  • Printer Friendly Pages

May goals (started):

  • Usability testing on Law Timeline
  • Continue work on required features for sites that are migrating to WordPress
  • Feature Development: Equipment; requirements lists in the works
  • Feature Development: Events; requirements lists in the works
  • Feature Development: Spaces; requirements lists in the works
  • Floormaps for remaining units if time allows
  • Review compliance workflow with Danianne and Simeon

2020-04-09

Unit site related COVID-19 updates:

  • Staff worked with unit stakeholders to make sure hours/closures were entered and displayed correctly.
  • The library emergency banner (now displaying the COVID-19 message) has been deployed all unit sites (except Law, as instructed by Library Communications).
  • An updated University Communications emergency banner has been deployed on all unit sites.
  • To make librarian chat functionality more visible, new Springshare chat slider widgets have been deployed to unit sites.
  • Library Directors decided to change the Ask a Librarian URL from https://www.library.cornell.edu/ask/email to https://www.library.cornell.edu/ask on all unit sites because of the current situation and making sure any user who clicks on that link sees all of the contact options available to them.

Course Reserves:

  • John's coding is finished, tested and deployed to a new server that Greg has provisioned. As of Wednesday, we have a development instance of Music successfully running an updated Ares plugin for Wordpress that is using the new service. Greg is currently doing more configuration work on the server.
  • Learned 4/2 that all physical reserves may be replaced with electronic equivalents? If so, the current service should no longer have to do Voyager lookups and the performance issue should be moot. Even in that case, I think we should still press forward with this, but then it would be purely on our own timeline.
  • Frances has started creating tests for the course reserves availability to ensure that we don't accidentally introduce breaking changes in the future.

Spotlight accessibility:

  • Kevin ran SiteImprove, scored 61.8.
  • Accessibility issues are a mix of template/system and content.
  • Lynette will be upgrading Spotlight to the latest version to see if there are accessibility fixes included.
  • Kevin will re-run SiteImprove after the Spotlight upgrade.
  • After the upgrade is completed, Kevin and Melissa will compile an inventory of accessibility issues in Github to represent the work split by template/system and content and come up with estimates.
  • We will make a proposal to Simeon for remediation work.
  • Kevin also suggests giving curators accessibility training.
  • As we add more exhibits into Spotlight, we're seeing the need for improved functionality. Not an immediate concern but will be needed.

Other content updates:

  • Mann and ILR floor maps have been finished and Olin has been started.
  • Olin and Asia content migrations have started.
  • Mann virtual exhibits have been handed off to the Outreach Team to finalize.
  • Olin exhibits are being migrated to Spotlight.
  • Current newsletter approach used for ILR is working well, but we may standardize on a different approach pending an exploration of Mann's requirements.
  • Students continue to work on the Law Timeline accessibility issue.
  • Overall students continue to work effectively remotely. Looking to hire another student worker.
  • Accessibilty compliance: Sara, Tobi and Andy will be meeting to do intial brainstorming and report out to the group.
  • Kevin did LigGuide accessibility training.

Other development updates:

  • Kevin fixed display issues with library hours.
  • Manolo finished work to improve the display of the internal site searches that will go live

Other issues and questions:

  • The hiring freeze means that we can't hire the contract developer. (We had gotten resumes for two strong candidates.)
  • Does the freeze on discretionary spending impact the project? (Paid plugins, etc.) According to Nancy Bolduc: "you will probably need approval from Simeon/Ezra. A strong business purpose would definitely help. I wish I could tell you more but we don’t know yet how all of this will affect our FY21 budget."
  • Note that CIT software map is going away in the Summer.
  • Nick returns to work at the end of April (23 or 24), at which point, he will be engaged in work developing the features for equipment, events and spaces.
  • Adam following up on one of our plugin subscriptions.
  • Adam and Simeon are discussing a plan to migrate and remediate accessibility for all remaining Drupal 7,8 sites ahead of end-of-life of both platforms in November 2021.

2020-03-12

Content Summary (Sara):

  • Sara and Andy finished an extended 2020 Roadmap document with monthly milestones the group has agreed to.
  • Sara and Kevin met with Asia stakeholders to review content and make information architecture improvement suggestions.
  • Content migrations: Mann finished, Olin/Uris in progress, Asia started.
  • Continued work on creating accessible floormaps for units
  • In the process of scheduling meetings with unit stakeholders for review
  • Content team meeting once a week

Development Summary (Adam):

  • Adam met with developers to decide on project structure, communication workflows, etc. Twice weekly developer check in meetings have started.
  • We had our first full-group milestone meeting to review February milestones and plan work for March.
  • We decided that we would shoot for Spring break to implement updated course reserves services.
  • We decommissioned eight Drupal sites in Pantheon that have been migrated to Wordpress:
    • africana.library.cornell.edu
    • catherwood.library.cornell.edu
    • engineering.library.cornell.edu
    • johnson.library.cornell.edu
    • law.library.cornell.edu
    • mathematics.library.cornell.edu
    • music.library.cornell.edu
    • rare.library.cornell.edu
  • Adam will be pursuing hiring a contracted developer to do development on ULS.
  • Adam will work with Melissa on an accessibility compliance plan going forward.

March 2020 Milestones:

  • Optimize Course Reserves for better performance
  • Continue Olin/Uris content migration
  • Continue Asia & ILR floormaps
  • Meet with Mann & Olin stakeholders for progress update
  • Check in with ILR on WIT - continued issues that need addressing?
  • Continued work on Custom Loop Elementor Widget
  • Mann & Olin Floormaps
  • Begin migrating Asia content if IA is agreed upon
  • Treatment of multiple hours on homepage
  • Address Law Timeline Accessibility
  • Compliance work - begin thinking about how we handle continuing to meet compliance, how do IT & unit stakeholders work together?
  • Implement new course reserves
  • Research and implement alert banner
  • Site search results
  • Asia & ILR Floormaps
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