Progress!

One of the first things I tried to do was to learn about the agency and the website that I'll be working with. That's translated to a lot of meetings and a lot of poking around on the website itself. I'm really starting to feel comfortable with things now. Since yesterday, I've been handling the webmaster email.

In my short time here, what have I learned and what have I been doing, you might ask...

• I learned that we have a large volume of content on our website (though it might not look like it at first) - about 6,000 web pages... now, I'm not saying that each of these pages has intrinsic value or that there are not plenty of old ones in need of cleanup, but... point is, we have a lot
• I've been trying to do cleanups - for example, in the 2004 public & special acts index (http://www.cslib.org/psindx04) all of the links were failing because the domain name of the site they linked to had been changed... I replaced all of them (fortunately for me) the site structure had remained the same).
• Even before this, however, I was given a list of broken database search pages (see: http://www.cslib.org/cslmade.htm for a partial listing). Unfortunately, fixing each database interface page required checking myriad details, a lot of trial and error and a lot of returning to the server's support pages. It turns out that in several cases, I even had to change column names in the databases in question, due to problems with earlier naming conventions. Hopefully, in the future, departments planning to build dbs that need to be web-accessible will consult with me to ensure that their design works well in that environment.
• I'd worked with the Automation folks - asking them to update some server software, which they were good enough to do very quickly. Once this was done, I was able to engage in a range of crucial functions, some I've already taken advantage of (such as setting up subwebs that I can then assign individual permissions to...) and some that I have in the works for the not-too-distant future.
• Participated in workshops, roundtables (yay, Webmasters' RT through CLC) & meetings, meetings, meetings... but it's all good & will yield greater productivity in the long run!
• Moved, along with the Fiscal staff, from 18-20 Trinity St. to the DEP building (79 Elm St.)

There's much more, but I'll have to treat many of these topics in separate blog entries.

The Learning curve

It's true - any job worth its salt offers learning curve. This one has been relatively painless and the pace is not frenetic yet, so I haven't felt overwhelmed. The first, best thing any webhead can do is to learn their organization. So that's what I've been doing. I've been:

• visiting with the different departments of the State Library and learning what they do (currently am meeting with the departments in the Information Services Division, many of whom put the public face on the library - such as History & Genealogy, Legislative & Law Reference, Government Information Services, and so on)
• learning how the website is currently developed
• getting my own favorite web tools together & installed
• doing basic webpage posting work (just a few pages so far)
• troubleshooting a much more involved problem related to the databases and their asp web forms
• serving on a couple of committees, including the library's "image committee" which is preparing for our annual statewide library conference and an open house in June

So that's been my first couple of weeks. That and I went to a CSS course that - while a tad lower-level than would be ideal for me - still answered some basic questions that were outstanding for me... perhaps because I've only really taught myself things like this and there are oddities that I wasn't sure were systemic oddities (and if so, why they existed)... Anyhow, things are going well & I'll try to make sure to post, particularly on the resolution to the great database/web form problem (or should I say problems?) that I've been troubleshooting (finally successfully!) the past couple of days.