I haven’t been on IM much for the past few weeks. I’ve been horrible at reading email, let alone answering it (apologies if you’re one of the nice people waiting for a response from me). I haven’t read my aggregator in at least a couple of weeks, maybe longer. I’m very out of the loop, but I’m still a happy camper because the new MLS web site is finally live!

We’ve launched phase one, with completion of phase two targeted for the end of June. Longtime readers may recall that we’ve been trying to launch a different kind of web site for more than two years. Phase one covers a large portion of my original vision, including blogs and a subject-based architecture.

Basically, we’ve gone from a web site patterned after how our organization is structured to a completely subject-based one that should better serve our member libraries. Each subject can have five types of content associated with it – “news” (which is really a blog), articles (traditional web pages), files (a document repository of PDFs, Powerpoints, Word documents, etc.), an FAQ, and a collection of links (here’s a good sample subject to help illustrate this). In phase two, we’ll add two more types, events and a discussion forum/bulletin board. The idea is to pull together in one place all of the content related to the subject, rather than making the user stumble around various parts of the site (separate bulletin boards, our calendar, our newsletter, etc.) trying to find it all. Within the next couple of weeks, we’ll also be adding RSS feeds for each subject, so it will be much easier to track the ones you’re most interested in. Plus, phase two will include an authentication/authorization component that will let us profile member librarians registered with the site so that we can display the most relevant content to them when the first log in.

There’s a lot more going on behind-the-scenes, including a streamlined process for adding content to the site. It all flows through a WYSIWYG editor so any staff member can now easily become a web author. Not that they all will, but we can finally take advantage of all the knowledge and expertise that’s been bottled up trying to get out. It’s the blogging revolution come to MLS, an extension of where we started with Movable Type on the old SLS site. The subject tree will flesh itself out automatically as we add content to those subjects that don’t have any yet (unfortunately you can’t see them all right now, but we can).

I’ll be interested to see if this format works better for our member librarians. I’m still amazed that Kansas City Public Library and Hennepin County Library came to essentially the same conclusions we did for organizing content at about the same time, even though we have very different audiences. We’re still migrating content from the old sites into the new one and will be doing so for a few more weeks, but we’re officially out of the holding pattern and can finally start adding new stuff, too. It’s a great feeling!