 Welcome. I'm God Digby. I'm the chair of the Library Technology Services Department at the University of Florida Libraries. Today I will be speaking about how we move forward with the large scale library website migration in the midst of the COVID pandemic. Prior to this year's migration, the University of Florida, George A. Smathers Library's website and web environment had been in place for nearly a decade in its current form and had not seen significant updating since it was rolled out. When I started at the University of Florida around four years ago, the need for our site to undergo modernization soon became apparent. This modernization was not only needed in the look and feel, but also in making the site responsive and design and fully accessible. Additionally, there was a need to improve the backend system architecture and platform and the overall information architecture and structure being used. Our website was a combination of platforms, including the main website that was self-hosted by the libraries on a system called .NETNUKE. Additionally, there were pages that we never migrated the last time around that existed on standard web server, as well as a significant number of pages that lived in LibGuides hosted by SpringShare. Further to complicate our situation, our Health Science Center library's website was hosted on WordPress that was being supported by our UF Health System. We knew we needed to migrate to a more modern platform, and additionally, we're looking to not have to host our own web servers. We also wanted to consolidate these platforms as best as we could to reduce support and bring in a more standardized approach across the library's web landscape. One of the first decisions we had to make was in choosing a platform that we were going to use. On campus, we had a couple of options. The central UFIT hosted the campus websites and was promoting Terminal 4 as the platform that we should use. In addition to this, many other colleges on campus were using various installations of WordPress. We wanted to make a wise choice and not rush into choosing one of these over another. So back in 2018, we decided to stand up a few sites using the campus hosted Terminal 4 instance, as well as similar testing using WordPress that was hosted by our UF Health System. By mid 2019, it was clear that after working with librarians and our web team, WordPress was by far the preferred platform. Since we wanted time to roll out, roll the new website out before a fall semester, we made the decision to plan the rollout to stop the site prior to fall 2020 semester. So by August 2020. That was our, that was our go live date. We were first going to focus on the content being the content being migrated that was housed on our .NET Nuke instance, and those existing library pages that had never been migrated during the previous migration. Decisions about lib guides and other specialized content will wait until later. During the fall of 2019, the web team conducted extensive site inventorying and planning for how best we could migrate all the content from our existing platform. Platforms and how to ensure that web editors from across the libraries were trained in the new platform and also that we had buy in from all involved to place a priority on reviewing and updating content as we migrated to the new system. We were lucky that our partners at UF Health are willing to work with us in the training and employment of our sites using their hosted platform and environment. As the spring semester started, everything was lining up in an orderly fashion, and we had identified about 60 web editors and approximately 50 distinctly different sites that constitute hundreds of hundreds of web pages that we would focus on during this phase of the migration. We also were lucky that UF Health, the web services there had dedicated trainer and they were willing to provide training for our web editors. With everything in place, we planned our first training on March 30 of 2020. And then like the rest of the country and our world, our situation changed drastically. This changed our work with the library technology services department in that we need to get quickly to now support a staff of around 250 remote workers with ourselves being remote at the same time to handle the COVID situation. So I just have a here up on the screen. That was our notice as of March 19. Like I said, March 30 was our first training that was all set up and by March, actually March 20 was our last day in the office as staff. So at this point we could have easily put our migration on activities on hold waited for the pandemic to be over before making the shift. But we decided to keep moving, except that things would now be done in a remote fashion. One of the important shifts for our department is that we wanted to make sure that the staff across the libraries could continue to work remotely. This resulted in us allowing and supporting staff taking desktop workstations and other technologies home, which was not a standard practice before COVID. It also meant that we had to scramble to make sure that staff and webcams headsets and even USB Wi-Fi adapters since most staff were not located, not looking at workstations right next to their home internet routers. As we moved to remote, we had to make some significant changes to how we were going to continue our work in migrating sites and continuing to ensure that web editors from around the libraries are being trained and that they were making progress on reviewing their content and moving into moving their content into the WordPress platform. First, we were planning on conducting our training by Zoom all along, so this didn't need to change. One benefit of moving remote was that the staff that were in the past were not as fluent in online conferencing technologies increased their skills and abilities in this area quite rapidly. We also decided that we would need to make sure that we had appropriate level of communication and documentation from the web editors so that we could continue to get answers in a timely fashion and continue their work. Before the pandemic hit, we had already started to use MS Teams as a central gathering point for the documentation and to provide communication channels between library technology web team and the web editors from around the libraries. But with the pandemic, we started to use this to even a greater extent. The web team also started to move more online for holding office hours and virtual office hours with the various web editors and units to discuss their migrations and review their content areas. As for my role and with my supervisor, we would normally function at a higher level of oversight with them move remotely. It was decided to increase the number of meetings that we would have with the web team to make sure that progress was happening and that they were aware of any blocking issues that we may be able to help take care of. This also made us in leadership much more present as part of the team. We created deadlines for content reviewers for the web editors to put in place, a period of months for the web team to review, push site forward into production. We actually were very successful in migrating the main web library website as well as our various branch sites before the fall semester. Entering the past three months we have been migrating the rest of the content forward. We anticipate that we will be complete with this phase of the project early in the new year. So delayed a little bit, but actually it rolled forward. At least the main site by our expected deadline of the fall semester. I would now like to talk about some of the unintended benefits that moving online for staff had in our project. At first moving remotely was seen as raising potential issues for project communication and can you can you continue forward momentum of the project. So many moving remotely presented us with opportunities. First of these was like I mentioned earlier, was that staff from across the libraries became increasingly fluent in online web meetings, which helped us in them attending trainings and participating in meetings with our web team. Secondly, from previous migration attempts it was difficult to get departments and units to review and make updates to their websites, which resulted in many sites never being migrated or having stale content. We were worried that this may be an issue again. Luckily, we did not face this. This was a result of many staff needing to put aside their regular work such as working with students or regular library activities, which left them time to focus on other activities, reviewing and updating web content was a natural fit in this time. We also wanted to make sure that library units and departments saw this as a priority. So we needed to make sure that we had buy-in from library leadership and managers. The moved remote present us with a perfect opportunity to communicate our progress and reinforce this as a priority. With the move to the remote, being instituted weekly town hall meetings to update staff on what was happening regarding COVID and other library activities, which we were able to share the progress on our website migration during these meetings. These were regularly attended by well over 200 staff, usually around 250 staff. So this was great visibility. Also, from a broader library leadership level, we had, we have joint chairs meetings. This consists of the library dean, associate deans and department chairs from across the libraries. These meetings were normally only held once a month, but as we moved remote, they became weekly. Every week we would update this group and discuss our progress and any issues that they should be aware of. These additional communication channels helped greatly in both awareness and support of the efforts that we that were happening to make the migration a success. There were normal challenges in migrating platforms, both from the technical and socio technical standpoint, making changes to a familiar platform will bring about some concerns but overall the project has been very successful. We have moved from a dated web environment with limited editing abilities to one that we have editors from across the libraries that are able to make their own changes to their content without having to involve our web team in every modification. I feel that this project has highlighted both our technology support staff's adaptability and also how our staff can adapt to new processes, even in times of unprecedented change. I'd like to thank you for joining me today and please feel free to reach out to me with any questions you may have now or in the future. Thank you.