The DLF would like to contract you for consulting services to help the organization define the functional requirements for a complete overhaul of the website. If you are interested in this opportunity, please write up a brief proposal for service provision with a budget. We anticipate a fairly short duration for this project, so perhaps one scoping feature limits it to the month of January assuming you're available.

As an organization knitting together the digital efforts of libraries around the world, the Digital Library Federation (DLF) relies heavily on its website to keep members informed and engaged. The site has grown organically over the years and contains many useful elements, but navigation has become mysterious and it is not clear to the staff of the DLF that the site is focussed on what is most important for the organization and its members. In addition, the site has been hosted alongside the CLIR site at a rather expensive host and the DLF needs to evaluate what sort of hosting and development services are most critical to a well maintained web presence.

Functional Requirements

Functional requirements for the DLF website will specify the capabilities and behaviors we want to see in the site. To understand what these capabilities and behaviors should be we will have to think both about the ideas that DLF staff have for the site and what the users of the site need from the DLF. We will develop use case scenarios to express these needs, then build the functional requirements on those use cases.

Note that eventually the DLF will have to consider the "non-functional" requirements of the site. What sort of reliability does it need? How deep does the security of the site need to go? How much can the organization afford to pay for the site? With what platform should the site be built? While these and other such questions will be very important to recreating the DLF site, these are out of scope during this phase.

Functional requirements will describe what the site should be able to do for users, it will not get into how these things get done. Gathering some information about the business requirements of the DLF site would be well within scope, since this underlies the functional requirements. Business requirements are, in a way, a broad-brush view of the functional requirements.

Gathering Background

The staff of the DLF have lived with the current site for a long time. They are the most familiar with its successes and limitations. As we embark on the task of recreating the site, we should take the time to gather these impressions from staff. I would develop a questionnaire designed to be answered by everyone on the DLF staff individually. While the questions would be designed to focus on the business and functional aspects of the site, staff would be free to provide whatever input they like. If some of this feedback falls outside the scope of functional requirements, I would simply record it and set it aside for later.

The staff feedback on functional issues would give me a starting point for the development of use case scenarios. This would include attempting a definition of the business requirements of the site. Why does the site exist?

Use Cases

Using the information from the background questionnaire responses as a seed, we would bring the staff of the DLF together for a one hour telephone conference to brainstorm use cases. These cases would illuminate how people from DLF member institutions and beyond use the DLF site. What do people try to accomplish?

The input from this brainstorming session will feed the development of four and ten use cases that express the role of the DLF site in the life and work of users. This document will be short enough (each use case being only a paragraph or two) to mail out to the DLF staff and board for comment.

Functional Requirements

The use cases and comments would serve as the basis for a draft set of functional requirements. These functional requirements will be a set of brief statements about the required capabilities and behaviors of the site. Does the site require individual accounts? Personalization? Search? Archives? Should users be able to register for meetings online? These are the sorts of questions that will be answered by the functional requirements.

I would prepare this draft, share it with the DLF staff via email, and ask for comments. If there are enough issues brought up in comments that would benefit from discussion, I would call together a second teleconference with the staff to discuss the draft. The functional requirements would be revised based on this feedback.

The revised functional requirements and use cases would be the product of this project.

Concerns

The process proposed here really does not allow for consultation with the members at large. This could lead to significant oversights in the functional requirements. While consulting the board does allow for some member feedback, the line staff of libraries who are involved in digital endeavors often have notably different needs than the directors who serve on the board. Given the compressed timeframe specified, real feedback from a broader array of members seems to be ruled out. However, it would be advisable to vet the finished product of this phase with at least some of the broader membership before moving into the development phase.

Timeline

If contracted to do this work, I could begin this project in the second week of January 2008.

• 1/16 deliver questionnaire to DLF staff, responses due by 1/21;
• 1/22 or 1/23 place the first (use case) conference call;
• 1/29 draft of the use cases available to share with board and others, feedback due by 2/4;
• 2/6 draft of the requirements could be ready for reaction, feedback gathered through 2/12;
• 2/12 second conference call (if needed);
• 2/15 final set of specifications delivered.

Costs

My honest assessment of this project shows that it will require at least a week of my time and cost $5000. However, I am happy to charge the DLF only $4300 for this work. I am expecting we could use DLF arrangements for the phone conferences, otherwise arranging these would be an additional expense.

Eric Celeste

Eric brings over 15 years of library and 25 years of technology experience to his consulting. At MIT Eric shepherded the creation of DSpace, open source digital repository management software developed with HP and now deployed at hundreds of institutions worldwide. At the University of Minnesota Libraries he encouraged the development of the UThink blog service, a wiki-based staff intranet, LibData, and the University Digital Conservancy. He works with non-profit institutions on appropriate uses of technology for informing, communicating, and collaborating with their constituencies.

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