Minutes
Attending: Barbara Prior (Acting Chair), Susan Barnes, Tony Cosgrave, Michael Engle, Meryl White (Recorder)
Barbara announced that she would be the Acting Chair for the next few meetings in Patricia OÕNeillÕs absence.
We will now switch to an every-other-week Tuesday meeting schedule. Our next meeting will be Tuesday March 5, 9-11, Olin 106.
Susan Barnes asked what our committeeÕs role would be with regard to evaluating the Single Point of Entry Strawman. We discussed it, and decided to wait until the Strawman is announced on CU-LIB. Once that happens, we will meet, discuss it, and forward our remarks as a group to the Digital Library Working Group. We will review the Strawman at our next meeting. The mocked up version is at http://www.library.cornell.edu/DLWG/SPOE.html.
We wondered what the relationships are between the developers group, the design group and the implementation committee, and whether the development of the Single Point of Entry interface would force a convergence of these groups. If there is to be a Single Point of Entry, it may not make sense for libraries to have individual homepages.
Barbara pointed out that some people expressed the opinion that the banner graphic is too large. Susan mentioned that Mann Library is going to change its graphic. We can think about shrinking the exisiting banner. There is an example at: http://www.library.cornell.edu/DLWG/SPOE.html.
This led us to a discussion involving graphic arts and graphics software expertise. Once Arshad graduates, we will not be able to change the banner graphic unless someone knows PhotoShop. We thought a class in PhotoShop would be useful. Susan mentioned that PhotoShop is very expensive and that Graphics Converter is $25 and is easy to use. Making sure we have this kind of expertise in the library system would be helful. Tony pointed out that Media Services has a WWW Service unit. We thought that it might be within the groupÕs charge to hire a graphic designer. Patricia was going to check with Catherine Murray-Rust on this issue. In the end we thought we would like to have both training for library staff, and the advice of a graphic designer.
We looked at some of the sample page layouts Meryl developed for the templates section of the draft Web Design Guidelines. People liked the simple long buttons, but noted that what the buttons stood for might not be correct for every library. The idea of the page layouts is to serve as example of what can be done. Michael noted that we could not do more than outline general principles that libraries should follow. For instance, if you choose to have simple buttons on your homepage, on subsequent pages you will need to have some explanatory text. We thought getting user feedback might help us in the design process. We could ask the CU-WEB-L list to look at the sample pages. We found we could agree on the header and footer elements more easily than on middle of the page. We will continue to discuss the form the templates should take at our next meeting.
Meryl White
Added February 28, 1996