Midwinter Event Planner Blues

In what has become something of a tradition, the Midwinter Event Planner has been opened… and widely panned on the ALA Council email list and several library blogs (What I Learned Today… and librarian.net, as two examples). I spoke to ALA Senior Associate Executive Director of Member Programs and Services Mary Ghikas yesterday about the future of the planner and prospects for immediate change in the planner. In the long term, ALA intends to migrate the event planner to the Drupal-based ALA Connect online community software. (See Internet Development Specialist Jenny Levine's ALA Marginalia post for more details.) That software, however, is still in testing, and with the IT resources we have, Ghikas said that her best projection of it being functional is Midwinter 2010. So where does that leave attendees this year? First, the full schedule has been made available as a .pdf for attendees who decide to forego the Event Planner, and Ghikas noted that it would be available to attendees earlier in the planning cycle for Annual. The event planner itself is a vendor's existing product and major development won't be possible for Annual, but Ghikas said that ALA would work with the vendor to improve instructions for features in the event planner that are functional but non-intuitive—specifying, for example, that printable or downloadable schedules can be generated from the entry page, rather than the schedule page itself (which, as commenters have noted, is termed the not-crystal-clear "My Itinerary"). Despite the planner's flaws, "For many people, this is at least an acceptable level," Ghikas said. "I think taking it down altogether is a bigger disservice." Levine is leading the development of the ALA Connect version of the Event Planner, in coordination with ALA's Website Advisory Committee. Ghikas said the process is focused on incorporating features that users say they want, including easy queries of the database for an event they know they want to attend, easy browsing for events they don't know about but might be of interest, the ability to queue up events if their first choice doesn't live up to expectations, and meeting descriptions accessible via a single click. (Meeting descriptions currently aren't available at all, a legacy of print's limitations that Ghikas hopes to address; the single click that many expect to give a description actually adds the event to a schedule, which many have found inconvenient.) It will also require "greater discipline in how we describe ourselves" to make events more findable to attendees who are not intimately familiar with ALA structure, Ghikas said, as one of the primary methods of finding events is currently by sponsoring unit. That process would be similar to the recent restructuring of the ALA web site. Levine will give an update on ALA Connect to the Executive Board at Midwinter at its January 23 (Friday) meeting (8:30 am-12:00 pm, Hyatt Regency Agate Room B-C; the IT section, of which her presentation will be a part, is scheduled for 10:45-11:25). Midwinter attendees can also attend the Web Advisory Committee meeting on Monday, January 26, 8:00 am -12:00 pm, Colorado Conference Center, room 602. Users can also give feedback on the current system by e-mailing Mary Ghikas, and watch the ITTS Update blog for updates.