Minutes of October 11, 2000 Meeting

A. Progress Reports:

Design Group

• Expected Known Downtimes - it seems that putting this info on the news pages is not effective. Hereafter, when we are warned ahead of time that an index/db will be down (for routine maintenance etc.) Sam will be placing the notice, in red, on the main indexes page under 'Having problems connecting to these indexes?' It will be much more obvious and will not take any more extra time or support.
• The Design group recommends changing the text 'Having problems connecting to these indexes?' to 'First time off-campus users must set up their web browser for remote access' or something to this effect. (decided and will be implemented).
• Digital Libraries page modified
  Added line at end of first paragraph " For more information on Digital Research and Development projects please refer to the web sites of the Scholarly Communications Center (SCC) and the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH). "
• Catalogs page text upgraded by Judy G., Sam optimized and changed the TOC
• Search engine changes
  • fixed Advanced Search page so button match in location to basic Search
  • changed it so previous words searched for appear in text box on search results page
  • made page back/next buttons 'more arrow-y (pointy)'
  • added backpath to help pages (realizing that I had no way to get back except for the back button)
  • noticed that with results returned at '10 per page' with 10 page icons, one can effectively only get the top 100 hits.
  • removed 'all of the above' from advanced 'Search method' you can't have exact AND contains
  • I can't even figure where htdig gets some of it 'terms' when you use a prefix search
    (eg. art*), I suspect out of the URL's
  • combined both search helps, clears up redundancy
  • added some more specific help to the advanced search page

Immediate Things
Indexes/Db's in process or coming:

• OED - difficulty in getting properly proxied
• CountryWatch
• Science Direct
• Historical Abstracts
• Lexis-Nexis
• Beilstein 2000

Research Guides Group

• Nursing RG live, not yet complete, not yet publicized
• V. Calderhead has agreed to do the Chemical Sciences and Physics RG's
• Housing RG forthcoming
• Patents RG raised from Bio/Engineering RG's to be stand alone
• Dissertation RG forthcoming

B. Instruction Liaison report

• Instructional Services Committee Web Resources Task Force met and had a productive meeting
• topics included: server space for testbed and for immediate use, ways to support larger projects, raising prioroty of modular instructional units, consider principles for usability, maintainability etc.

C. Search Engine

Placement on web pages:

• Buttons on top page will be large and in this order: Research Shortcuts, Search Libraries Website, Site Index
• Buttons on sub-pages will be smaller, but in the same order and with the same labels
• The icon for 'Welcome New Students and Faculty' will be me made clearer, re-titled 'Welcome New Users', Leslie Murtha will re-write the text on the page connected to by the icon (to be reviewed by the Design Group).
• Sam will write a news article and give it Harry to review
• the search engine will go live early Mon. Oct. 16

D. Phase II Survey--Pilot Results

Reviewed the reports(findings) and flowchart. There was a discussion about the non-cliackability of the descriptive bulllets on the front page. Au had a good idea about making them clickable to that categories page using Cascading Style sheets to hide the default link underlining. To be implemented. Other observations are in the findings, but two other things that need to be considered is the Section heading 'Indexes' (students don't understand) and that the Indexes section 'Multidisciplinary' does not seem to also convey 'General' to students

E. WAC SNACK - enjoyed by all