Public Interfaces Committee
PIC Minutes
April 28, 2004
Present: Julie Linden (chair), Katie Bauer, Karen Reardon, Andy Shimp, Kalee Sprague, Manon Theroux (recorder), Tim Young
Absent: Dale Askey, Tao Yang, Rick Zwies.
1. Announcements
Future Meetings: The May 12 meeting will start 45 minutes late because Julie will be attending the Library Management Council meeting that same morning. The May 26 meeting is being cancelled because Julie will be out of town.
“Online Journals + Newspapers” page: Karen fixed the keyword searching functionality so the order of the results now makes sense. She will add the search form and search tips / online journal and newspaper tips to the "no results" page (HTML version of the tips at a URL supplied by Bonnie Turner).
Front Door “News” section: Katy Hall, who is currently responsible for the content in the “News” section, is leaving the Library this week. Andrew Gray will likely be taking over the job until Katy’s replacement is found.
2. Voyager EndUser Conference
The Unicode version of Voyager is scheduled for general release in June. The beta version of Voyager 5.0 (the release after Unicode) is due this fall. The Library may implement the Unicode and 5.0 versions at the same time next summer.
We had anticipated that WebVoyage 5.0 would be XML-based, which would have allowed us greater flexibility in customizing our OPAC display; unfortunately only the MARC holdings display will be XML-based. Although this is good news for our holdings displays, it means that many of our other OPAC display problems will have to be submitted to Endeavor as enhancement requests.
One promising development is that a Reed-Elsevier human-computer interface group has been formed to redesign the Encompass interface. It will probably take nine months. After that, the same group will begin redesigning the WebVoyage interface.
3. Library’s “Search this Site” Switch to Google
The Library is currently using ht://Dig as the search engine for its web pages but the software is no longer being supported. We will be switching to Google, which is now also the University’s search engine. As an added benefit, the switch will allow us to stop running the chron jobs currently required for using ht://Dig.
Karen has registered the Library’s header and footer with Google and mocked up a page for testing. Testing has revealed that only sites under library.yale.edu are being retrieved; pages in the Medical Library, for example, are not being retrieved. Karen will talk to ITS to see what the University did to make pages from multiple servers retrievable through their searches. The archives from the Library e-discussion lists have been intentionally excluded from the “search this site” searches--the archives can be searched using a link on the Staff Front Door--but the archives from one list (Liblicense-L) cannot be excluded (at Ann Okerson’s request).
Karen will make the following changes to the interface:
-delete “Help” link, extraneous white space, horizontal rules, “search the University Web” section, “search the Internet” section, link to “Internet search engine tutorial”
-make “reference librarian” link go to “Ask! a Librarian”
-switch order of options under search box so that “search Yale Library only” is first and make font size smaller if possible
Julie will ask Sue Lorimer about deleting (or archiving) the “Internet search engine tutorial” as it is rather dated.
4. “Appropriate Use” Document
Kim Parker and Ann Okerson have written a policy on appropriate use of the Library’s electronic resources. They would like the document posted to the Front Door and a link to it added to various Front Door pages. Julie will ask Bonnie Turner to format the document using the “About the Library” template. We will link to it from the “Access + Use” page under the “Policies” section. For linking from other pages (e.g. “Databases + Article Searching”, lists of resources, search results pages), the group thought that one sentence (containing a link to the full document) added to the top of the pages should be sufficient. Julie will consult with Kim on wording for the sentence. We will not, however, add the sentence to DBOW pages for individual resources because not all resources are licensed (and thus they have no restrictions).
Julie will also ask Kim the following: 1) whether the intent behind linking to the “Appropriate Use” document is primarily legal, educational, or both; 2) how she wants to proceed for pages that do not fall under our domain (e.g. individual libraries' lists of databases and journals); 3) whether we should be replacing the links to the current “Permitted Uses” page with links to the new “Appropriate Use” page.
5. Redesigned SFX Menu
Dale did most of the redesign. Katie will look into having the following changes made:
-make the square bullets smaller (perhaps with rounded corners to match the “Go” buttons)
-remove the link from “check print holdings” (if possible)
-add the “ask for help from a human” link from the old interface but change it to “Ask! a Librarian”
-change the “show where you came from” link to “stable URL for this page” following the JSTOR model
Katie would also like a high-quality image (.gif) made for the banner using Dale’s design. The image Dale created cannot be resized and used in other contexts, such as promotional literature. We will ask Bonnie Turner if she can do this. If she cannot, we will ask George Ouellette. If he cannot, we will look into hiring a graphic designer. PIC supposedly has $5,000 allotted annually in funding for graphic design and usability testing.
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This file last modified 10/24/06
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