ACRL New England Chapter News Online

ISSN 1527-0106

Winter 2008, Number 112

In This Issue (Home):

2008 Annual Meeting - Registration Open!

ACRL NEC Provides New Online Services

Save the date - NELIG Annual Meeting, June 6, 2008

Board Meeting Minutes

Calendar

Fall 2007 Reports and News:

President's Report

NELIG Report

Member-at-large News

Webmaster's Report

Webmaster's Report

Val Harper
University of New Hampshire

In June 2007, ACRL/NEC began migrating its electronic presence from local servers at Boston University and the University of New Hampshire to a single hosting service. You may have noticed no change as you used these resources, but behind the scenes many changes have been made – most transparent to our users.

The reasons for the move were numerous. Other colleges and universities have been generously supporting our web pages and electronic discussion lists for many years. Over time, however, the people who set up and managed these resources were no longer active on the Board and had little time to devote to the care and feeding of these resources. Access to the web server was limited by the host institution to one person alone, who had to handle all updates to the pages; SIG chairs and others with content to add to the site had to send them to the webmaster for posting. Over time and the service of several members-at-large, the moderated electronic discussion lists were spam magnets, costing the moderator a great deal of time weeding out the unwanted messages. The time seemed right to move our services to a location that others who needed to manage content could access as well. After much investigation, the ACRL/NEC Board selected Bluehost.com as its hosting service, and the moving of our web site and other electronic resources was started.
The web site was the first to move; after the site’s new IP address was registered with domain name servers worldwide, it went live at its new home in early July.  In the next two months, the Board’s discussion list and two moderated general lists (acrlnec.news and acrlnec.jobs) were created, and the current subscriber base moved to the new lists. All of these migrations were accomplished with a minimum of downtime and disruption. In the next several months, our calendar and wiki will be recreated or migrated, and we will establish ecommerce capabilities for conference and workshop registrations.

What does this mean for you, our members? Through our new hosting services we can offer you a more robust and stable web server, faster turnaround time on discussion list submissions and approvals, more timely updates to web pages, and new services such as online registration and payment for conferences. Let us know what you think, and what we can do to serve you better through our electronic presence – you can contact Val Harper, the webmaster, at capcom@acrlnec.org.