On March 19th, the Web Governance Workgroup made a presentation at a VPC meeting updating the Directors on what the Workgroup has been up to since we were formed. If you’re curious and would like to learn more, you can find the presentation at https://ibis.lib.uconn.edu/teams/webgov/Documents/Web%20Governance%20Workgroup%20VPC%20Presentation.pptx.
Most of our presentation was focused on our proposed plan to build a new web presence for the UConn Libraries. The Directors approved our plan, so we’d like to take this opportunity to explain what we’re planning and when it will impact you.
The Web Governance Workgroup will be partnering with UITS Web Development (WebDev) on the design and creation of a new web presence. This new web presence will be our own instance of Aurora, which is UITS’s WordPress platform. This will give the Libraries a modern, well-supported content management system that will make it vastly easier for our staff to create and maintain our web content.
We believe that there are a number of reasons why the Libraries needs a new web presence, but the most important reason is the incredible rise in mobile devices – not just in ownership, but in usage. Going forward, our goal will be to design for mobile first. If we put content online, we want it to work everywhere and anywhere. We believe that this will be of significant benefit to all of our users, not just those on a cell phone or a tablet.
Our proposed timeline is detailed in the presentation we linked to at the beginning of this blog post, but the important thing to know is that we’ll be building the infrastructure & performing design work with WebDev over the summer, and then beginning in the Fall we’ll be working with you to port your content over. The Directors have asked that we bring a detailed project plan to VPC in May, and we’ll have much more detailed information available at that time.
The Web Governance Workgroup doesn’t want to make decisions about our web presence in a vacuum, and to ensure that doesn’t happen we plan on getting feedback from both external users and Libraries staff throughout the entire process. Outside of any scheduled feedback sessions that might happen, if you have questions or comments about the plan, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly.
Dave Hicking on behalf of the Web Governance Workgroup