A good launch needs a pre-flight checklist.

Launchlist.net covers the basics, with room to customise for your web project.

(via Coudal Partners)

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Most Australian universities have an online repository of their research papers, articles and theses. Some have adopted a policy of requiring academics to add their finished documents to these repositories (copyright and publishers’ contracts permitting, of course).

Striking an attitude of well-meaning befuddlement, Lane identifies an opportunity for institutions that are keen to improve the public impact of their research. In general, I agree with him; Australian universities don’t do much to promote their eprints repositories as sources of free learning. Thus far, we’ve tended to leave the repositories in the hands of librarians, computer programmers and occasionally to the advocates of so-called e-research.

By recognising eprints as valuable information assets, and treating them as we would other business assets, we could substantially improve the levels of public awareness of, and access to, the brilliant research being done across the country.

It ain’t rocket surgery. For starters it would be relatively simple to:

• provide a link from the main university home page
• provide a link (or even a search box!) from the university library’s home page
• feature new Open Access publications in the “news and events” section of the institutional web site
• include repository contents in results from the university search engine
• link repository records to the online staff directory and to the web pages that profile individual staff members
• as Melbourne University has done, link the repository records to the “find an expert” list that’s produced mainly for the benefit of journalists and prospective PhD researchers
• track and publish statistics on the finding and usage of those Open Access documents

What else could you suggest? How could your institution make more use of its eprints?

If you work in a large company, could you find a similar use for the articles, white papers and other documents your people produce?

How could you link people and systems to streamline the procedures for collecting and using this kind of information?

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Earlybird registrations are open now, and close next Tuesday 9 September.

Earlybird registrations are A$660, or A$550 if you quote the discount code MR0243. Register online at the conference web site.

The conference will be held in Sydney, on the weekend of 20-21 September.

Who should attend?

• Designers of navigation, organisation, labelling and search systems that help people find and manage information more successfully,
• Librarians, webmasters, and content owners responsible for creating taxonomies and information architectures,
• Application developers who design web and software solutions and select the technologies and staff to support them,
• Project and business managers needing to understand the benefits and challenges of information architectures in electronic information spaces.

[cross-posted at SneedleflipsockTheBlog]

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For interaction designers and information architects, some of the interest is in the design process itself — see Jesse James Garrett’s comments on the Aurora web page about the weekly ‘open design’ sessions that led to creation of the Aurora concept.

For the rest of us, part of the interest is in how much this project looks like an early prototype of the cool stuff Tom Cruise did with the police computer in Minority Report ;-)

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Here’s a bit of the ALA blurb about why the survey is important:

“Possibly the most important invention of the past century, the web is undeniably one of the most robust engines of knowledge transfer, political and social change, artistic endeavor, and economic growth the world has seen.

“Remove the web, and billions in trade disappear. Websites enable people who can’t walk to run to the store. They bring knowledge and freedom of thought to places where such things are scarce; make every person with a connection a citizen of the world; and allow every citizen to be heard.

“Yet nobody bothered to conduct a serious inquiry into the working conditions of people who make websites until A List Apart launched its first survey in 2007…

“The responses to last year’s survey began teaching the world about the previously invisible profession powering its information economy.”

The results of last year’s survey are freely available, as are the original datasets of 33,000 responses.

It only takes about five minutes to complete the 2008 survey. If nothing else, it’s an opportunity to reflect on your current situation. Are you happy in your role? What are your professional goals for the next 12 months? Are you valued by your employer/clients? How do they show it?

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Some parts of the web site flourish, becoming lush with useful content and links. Other areas suffer from neglect, developing bare patches or sprouting thickets of weed-like content that is outdated, superseded or simply not appealing to visitors.

Eventually, minor niggles add up to a general unease about the quality of the organisation’s online image and services. Senior managers understand that something’s wrong but — because they are senior managers — they are not interested in what they consider to be operational details. They want someone to “just fix the web site”.

This puts you, the web manager, in a difficult position. The problem is large and messy: multiple subsites, multiple maintainers, vague guidance from the executives and no agreed criteria for judging whether you have fixed the problem. Suddenly there’s talk about a web redevelopment project, implementing a content management system, changing people’s job descriptions so they allocate more time to web work…

Sounds familiar?

It’s tempting to treat this situation as a single problem. After all, that’s how the execs see it: do the project, solve the problem.

In my experience, this is a temporary solution. When the redevelopment project is finished, the project team is split up and moves on to other work. The redeveloped web site handed back to the people who used to tend the garden, often without much in the way of toolkits, training or helpdesk support.

After a year or two, the weeds and bare patches start to appear, dissatisfaction resurfaces among the senior managers, and the same process begins again. You find yourself treading the same circular path around the web garden.

Instead of continuing to wear a path in the lawn, you and your organisation may benefit from approaching web management as a long-term process-improvement activity.

With this approach, your web site develops gradually over time. A high-level strategy guides you and provides a long-term vision for the site. Web development work is incremental and iterative — that is, you change one thing at a time, measure the effect, learn from the experience, and then plan the next change.

This Virtuous Spiral model was developed and refined over several years by web staff at the University of Melbourne, in particular Martine Booth, Claire Spencer and Margaret Ruwoldt (that’s me).

We applied this model to our own web management work, and taught the model to colleagues in other departments. We observed informally as business units and project teams worked on improving their web sites. Overall, the likelihood of success seemed to be higher when the model was used.

The model is similar to well-established approaches for business process management. It draws on project-management theory and the concept of the virtuous circle.

The Virtuous Spiral’s usefulness goes beyond the field of web development. It can also be applied to other areas of business activity. During 2008 I will write in more detail about two case studies, showing how the Virtuous Spiral can be used for staff training and internal communication programs.

Further reading

Wikipedia: virtuous circle and vicious circle

Wikipedia: project management

Wikipedia: human interaction management (business process management)

Jeffrey Veen (2000). The Art and Science of Web Design. New Riders Press, USA. ISBN 0789723700.

Jesse James Garrett (2003) “The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams“, essay published by Adaptive Path

Greg Storey (2005) “Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Web site for No Reason)“, article in A List Apart

Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler (2 ed, 2004) Web Redesign 2.0: workflow that works. New Riders Press, USA. ISBN 0735714339. Related templates and tools downloadable from the authors’ web site.

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