Public Interfaces Committee
July 7, 2004
SML 411
9:30-11:00
Present: Dale Askey, Katie Bauer, Debbie Falvey, Julie Linden, Stephen Naron,
Karen Reardon, Earl Roy, Andy Shimp, Kalee Sprague, Manon Theroux, Tao Yang,
Rick Zwies
Absent: none
Minutes: Dale
Announcements:
- Welcomed new members--Debbie Falvey, Stephen Naron, and Earl Roy--to PIC
and shared bits of collective wisdom.
- Summer Web classes are mostly full, some with waiting lists.
- Firefox has been pushed to approx. 375 staff machines.
- ILLiad - new version coming in July. Katie spoke with staff working on this
about ILLiad pages and found resistance to change text. A template will be applied,
making the background white; also, the bars will go away. The word ILLiad will
appear less frequently. Katie is urging them to provide a link to help and PIC
agreed that this is a "matworthy" issue.
- Orbis patches coming on August 1st. Two patches will be installed by Friday
of next week, with the week of 7/26 reserved for testing. Kalee needs PIC members
to test WebVoyage. We agreed that it would be best to meet in SCML or the EC
to do this rather than doing it at our desks, with a tentative date and time
of Wednesday 7/28 at 9:30. These patches should allow authentication by NetID,
although not immediately. Other patches include fixes to circ functions (charge
on charge) and Your Library Account display issues.
- Karen announced that new Orbis clients will be coming on August 1, but that
there are issues concerning their ability to pull back a pushed client if necessary.
Database display issues (DBOW):
- Katie raised the general issue of providing icons after a database name
that provide more information (specifically image databases). The IConn image--to
which we are contractually obligated--and the trial image currently in use are
examples.
- Discussed providing a dynamically-generated list of current and recently
ended trials and agreed to proceed with this (Karen showed demo version and
we agreed to adopt it with minimal revisions). Earl suggested linking to it
via the small icon, which Karen said is possible (with alt text along the lines
of "see list of trials"). Julie will ask Bonnie Turner to create a
header graphic for the results page (Trial Databases).
- Brief exchange about whether we were heading toward icon profusion and whether
there would be other ways to achieve what we want, namely user configurable
lists of databases based on various criteria (SFX-enabled, images, fulltext,
abstracts, discipline, etc.).
- Karen noted that Hannah Bennett will be resurrecting the Image Finder that
Barbara Rockenbach started a few years ago with Karen.
- Creating a list of SFX-enabled databases--since this is already in a DBOW
record--should be fairly straightforward and Karen agreed to do this to replace
the current static HTML list in use..
- Tabled the discussion about whether to implement icons for future meeting.
Members of PIC will discuss this with their departments where relevant.
Orbis change requests:
- Agreed to scratch third bullet under "place request screens" that
dealt with the inability to place requests from combined database search screens.
Since the combined search didn't even seem to work that well we doubt this is
much of an issue for most users.
- On Your Library Account screens, Kalee suggested that we return to language
created during the last attempted rollout of NetID authentication that included
proxy card users. When we implement NetID in the near future, this will appear
along with that.
- Help pages search option: Julie will ask Bonnie to mock up a version that
has a small search box at the top of the left column. Should we adopt this (we
are leaning toward doing so), the button that currently reads New Search will
need to be revised to New Orbis Search.
- Orbis is down page: Agreed to edit current text to read "A search-only
version of the Yale Library Catalog is temporarily in use."
- Stopped the discussion on the issue of Orbis graphics and screen space and
will resume there at future meeting.
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