Minutes of October 11, 2004 Meeting

Present:: Ka-Neng Au (Chair); Vibiana Bowman; Stephanie Bartz; Rebecca Gardner; Karen Hartman; Dave Hoover; Sam McDonald (recorder); Robert Nahory; Karen Wenk

Announcement

New WAC member has been appointed: Laura Mullen

Sam showed a possibility for a new front page image. The new image is 'squarer' and has a better balance of single/groups, tech/books. The narrower image allows the 'bookmark' to move left (and still remain on screen at lower resolutions). The text block (the changing area) will become a couple of characters narrower as well.
The Government Publications Committee requested some textual additions to the government e-journals list. WAC-D worked with the GPC representative to get the text added without hurting the usability of the page. WAC approved the demo and will be implemented by Sam ASAP.

Sam discussed some issues with the website to IRIS Quicksearch. Issues such as spaces (2 keywords) in Netscape 4, fragile javascript is required to get the non-standard form submissions to work in IRIS, validation is done by JavaScript (which does not work in the MyRU portal). Shaun will create a PHP script to replace the javascript components (probably early Dec.)
7 library channels are now available and live in MyRutgers. [Note: Users need to currently add the library channels to their 'view' deliberately].
The WCMS group has not yet met to reconsider the core assumptions of a WCMS or to make a plan for further review or implementation. Sam has not yet had time to prepare for this group to reconvene.

Stephanie Bartz reporting for IPAC

Rebecca Gardner reporting for ISC

The instruction web pages are being heavily revised by Roberta Tipton and Heather Huey. The revised pages should be up for spring semester.
Vibiana and John have developed a 'Connect from home' tutorial using Flash. A discussion followed that included questioning support of the flash code and the maintainers of the browser configuration pages. The discussion was left with:
- If the Flash help gets put on the website it should be linked from the browser configuration pages.
- The browser configuration pages are 'owned' by Systems. Systems decides if the Flash tutorial gets linked to (and informs Sam if so).
- If Systems does decide to link to the Flash tutorial then they get to direct feedback to have changes made to the Flash tutorial.

Dave Hoover - Systems Report

SSL was successfully implemented on a temporary production machine for SAILS. Technologically speaking, SSL will be able to be used in the near future for other applications. One 'easy' application would be to have the Ask A Librarian forms be made more secure so that users who enter their SocSecNum's will be better protected.
A new proxy server technology that can use NetID's is to be ready in early spring. It is a a URL re-writing proxy server. It is intended to run this in parallel with the current proxy system for an undetermined amount of time. The 'Connect from home' and related pages will need to be reviewed and updated. URL's to licensed resources may also need to be changed.

Goal setting: Tabled until November meeting

RU Repository

Grace requested that WAC assist in making/designing a presence of the RU Repository on the website (staff pages initially).
Since WAC does not have any content or information on the repository, Au, as WAC chair, requested that the chairs of DAWG and the Scholarly Communication Committee help by considering what content should be placed there and then submitting it to WAC-D to work with.
WAC agreed that the logical place to link to this section, when created, would be as a third link at the bottom of the staff pages under 'Events and Meetings Calendar'.