LIT Committee Meeting: Thursday, March  5^th, 2009 9:30am at the Cumberland Public Library

Attendance: Mike Barrette(JOH), Rick Payette(OSL), Georgene Luttmann (COV), Susan Moreland(NKI), Joan Gillespie(OSL), Chris Jeffers(PAW), Celeste Dyer(CUM), Lisa Davis(OSL), Deborah Homer(JAM),  Prue Fallen (TIV)

Call to order – Susan Moreland called the meeting to order at 9:44am.

Minutes of the February 5, 2009 minutes meeting – Mike made a motion to accept the minutes of the last meeting. Celeste seconded the motion. Motion passed and minutes passed.

Discussion of Web Forums:

General discussion on the different products the committee had decided to consider in the February meeting.

Drupal – Rick had installed a demo at 204.17.98.35 for us to play with. Chris thought Drupal was complicated to set up and the entire CMS topic might be beyond our capacity to truly evaluate. Georgene had read several pages of comments and many comments supported Chris’s conclusion that there was an initial steep learning curve. Comments also pointed to issues because Drupal is open source and modular. Some modules break when the core is updated to a new version. Who will maintain and keep this up?

Alfresco- Rick had installed this at 204.17.98.35:8080 for us to play with. Deb thought this was a good option for a collaborative environment but was less than impressed with the Forums. Rick said we can buy support and liked how Word and PDF documents could be uploaded. Some felt the interface would be confusing for the general membership.

Web Wiz, the new version – Rick thought that even though the new version has more features it appeared to be less complicated. Security would not be a problem. It costs $95 with support and allows more than one instance to run on that license. 

vBulletin – Not much discussion but that the forums are easy to use for the public.

Community Server – The discussion was brief because no one really had the time to get to it.

General discussion on how we might use individual products that we are familiar with and combine them to fulfill our perceived needs of discussion, calendar and publishing.

Eventkeeper - a good, inexpensive solution to the calendar and very familiar to many because of its wide spread use among the OSL libraries.

WordPress – a free publishing solution to keep track of documentation such as policies for OSL. Many policies as currently posted are outdated and inaccurate.

Web Wiz – an inexpensive and familiar discussion solution to take the place of Public Folders on the Exchange server. An older version is currently being used for the LIT forum.

Georgene would like to see a Wiki product eventually.

Joan proposed that she go back to steering to request money for a professional consultant so that OSL does not find itself in the near future being limited by an uninformed choice. All agreed.

Other Topics:

Wimba - Prue brought our attention to how OLIS will be using WIMBA for their online classes. Her staff is concerned about how to use it. Some libraries do not have a separate room to use for this. OSL will look into the possibility of using their conference room on March 26. Celeste mentioned that the D Plan class (Disaster Plan) for next year is Wimba. Tentative topic for discussion at the next meeting is Wimba.

Envisionware – On April 6^th an individual from Envisionware will come to RI for 4 to 5 days to teach OSL Staff how to install Envisionware. She will be available to go to some installations that will be difficult.

Encore – Waiting for the new server to stabilize before installing. No date yet.

The next meeting is at 9:30am Thursday, May 14th at the Cumberland Public Library.

Adjournment – the meeting was adjourned at 11:05am.

Submitted by Georgene Luttmann