The countywide program will most likely not go online in 2007

I had a meeting today with CLP's IT Department, who designed the online environment for CLP's Summer Reading programs. Basically, here's what we didn't realize:

• Creating a whole new portal would require at least 100 hours of labor, not counting training, at at least $30/hour. This kind of money is not in the District Services budget this year.
• A simpler version, in which the district libraries are simply added to the existing framework (as we had discussed at our meeting) would be possible, but still expensive (probably about 35-50 hours) -- however, your customers would need to access this through the CLP webpage and it would have CLP branding.

Why is it so expensive? Here's a few reasons:

• Development time -- programming, security layers, etc.
• Testing time -- CLP's IT Dept. refuses to launch something that isn't perfect (as well they should)
• Training time -- With either of the two options above, extensive staff training and development of a training manual would be necessary.
• Graphic redesign -- Taking department resources away from other things to focus on a project that is only used three months out of the year. CLP is planning a major website redesign in which all areas of the website (including the teen webpage) have a similar look and feel. If there is not a separate design for the County TSR page, it will look like a CLP page.

Going online in 2008 MAY be possible

If you think it's worth the time and resources, I can work to find money to move the countywide summer reading program online in 2008. We can look for grant funding (sometimes hard to find for teen programs) or try to add it to the District Services budget. If the latter, I'll need buy-in from the directors, so please start talking to yours now.

Before going to the Development Office looking for grants, I need to get some information. I can ask our IT Dept. for an estimate, for which I need to tell them what we want. Please go to CLP Teen Summer Reading page (www.carnegielibrary.org/teens/tsr) and check it out. Let me know if there's anything you see right off the bat that needs changed.

Also -- if you picked up information about online programs at PaLA, please send me that info so I can ask other vendors for bids as well. Get a friendly competition going.