Minutes of October 26, 1998 Meeting

Present:

Ananthan, Borisovets, Cassel, Fabiano, Mardikian, Piermatti, Scholz-Crane, Warwick, and, Witteman

Absent:

Nash

Announcements and other business

Witteman announced changes to how location, sub-location, copy, and the status of BNA records display in WebCat. The decision to change the display was recommended by SACOPS. BNA records prior to purchase approval will display as follows:

Scholz-Crane will submit an announcement of these changes for an upcoming issue of the agenda

Display and indexing of content notes (505 field)

• After some discussion and examination of sample records, the committee agreed that we should continue to index information from this field since all members agreed that the advantages of the indexing out weighed the disadvantages.
  Identified advantages include:
  • Increased searching access to individual records
  • Access to chapter titles and authors through author and title keyword searches
  • Methods for ILL staff to verify requests

The committee also agreed to continue displaying content notes in the full record format.

Navigational buttons

• Top & bottom buttons
  The committee discussed the possibility of adding the light blue navigational buttons to the bottom of each IRIS screen. Ananthan sought clarification from the committee on whether top and bottom buttons are needed on each screen or only on result pages. After some discussion, the committee agreed that top and bottom buttons are needed for Browse Result Screens, Search Result Screens, and Single Item Displays in Catalog, Reserves, and Self Services.
• Request Item Button v. ILL Button
  Many of the ILL requests that are coming through all three campuses are for materials already own by a Rutgers University Library. The committee reached consensus on two possible causes for the confusion: one, users are not reading the ILL instructions and two, users are overlooking the REQUEST ITEM button. The committee proposed two recommendations for improving the accuracy of ILL and RRS requests:
  • Change the instructions on the ILL page. Suggestions included making the word "not" more noticeable either by size or color, shortening the yellow paragraph to essential information, offering a link within the paragraph to complete an IRIS search
  • Change how the REQUEST ITEM button displays. Suggestions for improvements include changing the color and/or size of the button, moving this button to the same area as the check box for download/e-mail (see test catalog), and changing the name of the button to Rutgers Request or Rutgers Request Service.

The committee will continue to discuss the various options via e-mail and will consult with J. Gardner in making a final decision.

Help update

Scholz-Crane reported that the in-context help pages are still in development and asked for help in editing these pages prior to loading. Piermatti and Cassel volunteered to help edit.

Share your concerns

Committee members offered suggestions for ways of improving WebCat. The committee divided suggestions into items that could be quickly decided upon at the present meeting and those that needed further discussion.

Resolved items include:

Unresolved items include:

• Adding authors to an items short display (currently available for viewing in the test catalog)
• Add a LIMIT SEARCH button under a subject browse display and/or a hypertext link from subject
• Hyperlink only matches to full subject strings, e.g. link to enter heading of United States-History-1961-1969 instead of just United States-History
• Add instruction on the Advanced Search screen pertaining to the selection of more than two limits
• Revisit Short Record displays
• Revisit how serials records display

Next meeting

PAC will meet next on Thursday, November 19th at 9:30am at Kilmer