NISO’s New Website

This new website launched publicly over the weekend. It has been about 8 months in a development phase and even longer than that in its planning. In addition to the obvious new look, more importantly the back-end of the site has been completely overhauled. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we were able to invest in a system that provides tools that will better help NISO manage its own processes and reporting requirements, will coordinate the work of the various technical working groups, allow us to provide better document tracking, as well as improve balloting, registration and other member services.

The old NISO website included nearly 4,000 HTML, Powerpoint and PDF pages and almost 2 GB of data in a variety of formats. There was also a variety of contact, voting and member data in a ColdFusion database. Any transition of this size is bound to be difficult and cause problems. The structure of our new site is based in large part on a database structure of interlinked and dynamic pages. As such, we couldn’t simply copy and move HTML pages to the new site. Most pages needed to be recreated in the new system. We are still in the process of moving over data. Our goal was to move the most recent information first and fill in additional information as we move forward. There are also bugs that we have found and we are working with our hosting service to fix them.

Despite the challenges, we think that you will agree that the new site is easier to navigate and the information on it is more accessible. We will be organizing some webcasts later this month to provide training on how to use the system for members and committee members. These webcasts will be recorded and available on the site after the meetings, if you can’t join us. More information on these members will be distributed to the community in the coming weeks.

If you spot any problems or bugs, please email nisohq [at] niso. Thank you for your patience as we move through this transition.