Minutes of November 4, 2002 Meeting

Present:: Ka-Neng Au (Chair), Stephanie Bartz, Vibiana Bowman (by video), Jeanne Boyle, Theo Haynes (by video), Sara Harrington, Dave Hoover, Sam McDonald, Leslie Murtha (recorder), Karen Wenk

WAC-C

The guide to ALERT Services is ready to roll out. The Indexes page will be revised to reflect this, and WAC will encourage the maintainers of research guides to include a link to the Alert Services page where appropriate.
At the WAC-C meeting on 11/1, Sam distributed a chart indicating the ownership and status of all the existing research guides. The chart was slightly amended; the Music guide has been cleaned up (9/02 - S. Bartz), but no new sites have been added. The guides for math, psychology, computer science, and statistics are believed to be undergoing revision at this time. Sam and Au will update the chart to reflect all known changes.
The committee discussed the ongoing problem of keeping research guides up to date. No powerful solutions emerged from the discussion. This issue will be revisited at the next meeting.

A request has been received from the Planning Committee and the Coordinating Committee to add a link to the top level of the staff pages to a list of documents that are relevant to planning for the next phase of the DLI. Suggested titles are "Planning Resources" or "DLI Planning Resources." Under this heading would be a collection of links to documents that relate to planning, culled from the records of RUL committees. WAC agreed that this could be a useful resources. Au will ask the Planning Committee to draft a prototype.

A suggestion has been made that the link to "Libraries and Centers" should be moved to the top level page, just under "News." It was agreed that this should be done.
The RUL directories have been revised and updated. The Design group will look at the labeling of the staff directory pages.
Text explaining the removal of the telnet links to Eureka databases has been drafted. A notice has also been sent to RUL_everyone.
Lexis-Nexis links have been updated to reflect the name change to Academic Universe and Statistical Universe. Cross references will be created to help users to make the transition.
A new research guide has been completed. The subject is Germanic literature and languages. Jim Niessen is the owner and Sabine Rauchmann contributed.
Design Group will consider alternative labels for the link to "User Services" to see if a less confusing term can be employed.
Design Group will review the links to "Other Library Catalogs" for currency, and remove unnecessary "version" designations.
A new "How do I " page has been proposed on the topic of writing a research paper. Jeanne, Au, and Leslie will form a working group to review the pages on this topic on the Camden pages, and draft a prototype.

On 11/12, a meeting will be held to discuss updating and clarifying the process of preparing newly acquired electronic resources for rollout. Group will include Sam McDonald, Theo Haynes, Dave Hoover, Elizabeth Leister, Mary Page, and Anne Butman.

EBSCO has changed the URLs of some journals, resulting in broken links on the E-Journals page. When the next update is sent to us, the records will be pre-processed before being loaded to the catalog.
When the purchase of Serials Solutions has been completed and the product has been implemented, the E-journals page in its current form will be pulled. WAC plans to invite Mary Page to join us to discuss implementation of the public face of Serials Solutions.
There is still no search tool for use on the staff pages.
There was a discussion of whether or not the current practice of indexing the site monthly was sufficient. It was decided that we do not need to index more frequently at present.
The EBSCO alert service was accidently turned on when the new interface was implemented in September. This service provides very confusing and deceptive information to the user. It was decided that it should be turned off.
Currently, when users click on the EXIT button, they end up at the VALE pages. It is preferred that the back path take them to the RUL Indexes page. The preferred text for the button would be "Exit to RU."

Jeanne reported that the IRIS guide is being updated, with Stephanie Bartz as project leader. Outdated sublocations will be eliminated. Problems with relational operators have been reported and are being fixed.
Problems with brief records, primarily for government documents, are being reviewed; many have been added on the fly, but never cycled into the recon loop.
Display formats for records of items other than books and serials are being reviewed for consistency and clarity.
The next Unicorn release is under review. One enhancement is the ability to broadcast a search to other Z39.50-compliant catalogs. It is suggested that the RU Law Library catalogs and the catalog of the Center for Research Libraries would be good choices.
IPAC plans to do a regular review of other academic libraries' implementation of SIRSI.

The Vagelos report was discussed.
There was a discussion of whether WAC should support a change of the RUL default browser from Netscape to Internet Explorer. IE is still a problem for proxy server connections. If Netscape 6 can be supported, there will be fewer design issues connected to browser choice. WAC will ask the PC working group to investigate the feasibility of upgrading to Netscape 6 on public terminals.

Meeting adjourned at 11:45. Next meeting 12/9/02.