Minutes of Wednesday, January 9, 2002 Meeting

Present:: Sam M, Marty K, Leslie M, Rebecca G, Vib B, Au, Theo H, Sara H, Dave H, Jeanne B

Agenda

A. Design

B. I'Things

C. Research Guides

D. Instruction

E. Systems

New look and feel coming out Jan 22.
Some comments have been made that the links on the new pages are hard to see. This may be revisited after we come live.
Sam is working to finish all pages conversions in time for Jan 22. Please help him by reviewing the checklist at the top of the demo page.

Five new resources pending. A new batch is expected soon. Theo used the Net Resources forms to see who to contact about each resource. It worked good in some instances.
Should we highlight Worldcat in the News page at the top level (Yes, it will be there when new pages are released).
Need some descriptions redone. Need to review all of them, possibly assign them to people. Maybe selectors should own descriptions and change them as the product changes. For now I'things will divide the descriptions up and assign them to RUL_WAC members. A schedule will also be devised for periodic review (yearly). 5 a piece will be assigned with the older ones being looked at first.

A memo will be prepared fro CDC about which guides need updating or enhancement (finding aid -> research guide). New areas that are in need of guides will be listed.
There will be a seminar scheduled for May 31 on how to produce a Research Guide. There are 2 confirmed panelists. Seminar will be called "Care and Feeding of Research Guides" Time 9am-noon in the Lecture Hall of SCC.
Style manual will be updated prior to the seminar to reflect the new design changes in the RUL website.
An announcement of the Seminar will be made in CDC as it is hoped that more people will be come involved in producing Research Guides.

Still working on revisions to the Instructional services web pages.
An Electronic form for requesting instructions is being developed.
Basic pages are almost up and running.
Looking to use templates and shared files so others can use the content and revise it for current classes.
Revisions are being made to paper brochures to match the web look.
Leslie is the Instructional Coord. for Kilmer and Off-Campus while Jeris is on sabbatical. Eileen Stec is developing an Academic tutorial.

Private Address Space in the dorms. It is non routable outside the University - so while our machines will see it, outside machines cannot. So all devices in Private Address space must be translated to IP addresses that can be routed outside the University. This is accomplished by having the connection go through a Network Address Translator (NAT) that makes the connection to the remote resource with a routable IP address, waits for a response, and then sends the repsonse back to the private address that made the request.

Web caches. These are machines that were running in normal routable Rutgers IP space (ie 165.230.*.*) that tried to cache web pages and images that had not changed. In theory this would have allowed local RUL machines to retrieve information more quickly, than going out on the internet for it. At first these caches were only being used by the campus housing subnets, but with the coming of the Nimba virus the whole University was put behind them. So whether you were coming from Rutgers routable IP space, or Rutgers non-routable (private) IP space the outside world showed you as coming from one of the web caches. As it became apparent that the web caches were causing more trouble than they were worth, TD decided to remove them at the end of December.

Once the Web caches were removed, the IP addresses used by the NAT machines were being sent on to the vendor. Unfortunately the library had not been made aware that the NAT machines ran on IP address ranges that had never been given to our remote vendors. Systems contacted VALE for the databases they administered and gave them the new IP ranges. A copy of our proxy configuration file was given to Bob Terrio, so he could get contact information for each vendor to inform them of the new range of addresses. This process will be ongoing and we will try to devise ways to test this. Bottom line is that access to remote vendors from Rutgers Private IP space will need to be reported and followed up on.

WAC would like to look at the new version of htdig (our search engine) that does phrase searching. Dave H will look to load the current set of RUL pages to a differnet server and index them there using the new version of htdig. Instructuions ofr searching with the new search engine will be provided.

WAC would also like to look at search terms entered by users to see what people are searching for, and see if better direction can be given to users about how and wher to search for material. Dave H will look into providing a sample of the htdig logs fro people to consider.

STAFF RESOURCES