Access

Each professional branch, commission, committee, working group and other formally recognised body within IAML is invited to appoint one or more of their officers as editor(s) of their IAML web pages. It is recommended that technically confident members are selected to have access rights to the pages for which they have responsibility on the IAML website.

Editors have rights to create new content and to edit existing content for their pages. Pages created or modified by the editors go into "moderation" mode and are not visible to other users immediately.

The webmaster checks the uniformity of the new material with other pages of the IAML website, tests links and categories and then makes them available to all the users.

Content

Recommendations for content:

• Summary of activities and function of the group
  
• Officers' names and email addresses
  
• Titles, abstracts and authors of past conference papers.
  

As the goal is to make information available to members and visitors to the site, keeping the page design simple helps accomplish that.

Forthcoming titles and abstracts can be published on the site as soon as a conference programme is officially published.

Files are uploadable to the IAML site but only in a limited number of file formats. PDF is the preferred format for documents. File size is of course limited too. When in doubt, contact the webmaster.

Copyright

Copyright clearance must have been obtained for all material added to the IAML website, so that the site and the webmaster are not exposed to legal challenge. Evidence should be sent to the webmaster.

Photography, video, music (notation or sound files), illustrations and artwork are considered intellectual property and for their use the creator's approval or an appropriate license is required. Before you take anything from another Web site, please ask for permission to use it.

Conference papers may be published after the conference, although they must be checked for copyright clearance: presentations may present copyright problems, especially in the case of photographic and scanned images.

Chairs of branches and commissions have editorial responsibility for all content published on their pages.

Language

The official languages of the site are those of IAML - English, French and German. Material can be submitted in one of these three languages.

Material in other languages is also invited, but should be translated into English before publication, except when restricted to pages aimed at particular geographical areas, such as the Latino-America Forum.

It is recommended that site editors have text checked by native language speakers.

Notes for the editors

• Don't make your pages too large. If pages are too large, visitors will wait a long time for them to load. Try to organize the content in sub-pages, like paragraphs and chapters in a book. For an example, see the Broadcasting and Orchestra Libraries branch homepage and the Activities page of the Public Libraries branch.
• Remember that the more HTML formatting there is, the longer it will take for the page to load. Using many colour changes and font size changes will require more time for the computer to lay out the page and often make reading the page difficult.
• In any case, the use of graphics should be minimized, so that pages load fast from slow links.
• Don't have links to sub-pages that are still under construction. It's easy enough to add these links as those pages are completed.
• Do not use tables to organize the page appearance, use them just when you need to organize data in the page.
  Screen reader software used by most visually disabled people reads the text from left to right, ignoring any tables that you make. If you use tables, you should make an effort to make sure that reading a whole page left to right doesn't confuse such software.
• A set of "How-to" presentations explaining how to use the online editing tools on www.iaml.info site is in progress. In the meantime, contact the webmaster for editing instructions.

Use of graphics

• In general, PNG or JPEG format are the best from a technical standpoint and most widely recognized by Web browsers.
• Always have a textual alternative for in-line images:
  

  <img src="/files/KennedyCenter.jpg" alt="Image of the Kennedy Center, Washington D.C.">

  This allows those not viewing images to understand your page.
• Include the HEIGHT and WIDTH code for all images. This way people can be reading your page while the images are still loading in.

Links and email addresses

• Do not list an address of an individual unless explicitly asked to have it listed: most people do not want a lot of extra mail.
• In any case, due to spiders that harvest email addresses from web pages, it's a good idea to limit the email address on the page to those really relevant and ask the webmaster to protect them from spam bots.
  
• URLs which refer to other pages in the site should be absolute, starting from the root page. That is, page names should start with "/" (e.g. "/organization/committees/copyright" for http://www.iaml.info/organization/committees/copyright).
  
• Always include the specific page name without "/" at the end, e.g. "/publications/fontes" for the Fontes page. "/publications/fontes/" will lead to a "Page not found" error.
  
• When the link points to a page not on the IAML site, always include the text "http:" at the beginning. In other words, always use "http://" before a host name.
• For any link please specify a small descriptive alternative, as you do for images.