Documentation Committee Meeting

October 7, 2005

Attending: Camille Andrews, Carmen Blankinship, Amy Blumenthal, Ken Bolton, Gaby Castro Gessner, Gail Steinhart

Guests: Michael Friedman, Joanne Leary, Ida Martinez

Minutes: Gail

Announcements

• Gail announced that she attended the PSEC ROC meeting with other sub-committee chairs. The group discussed how sub-committees and ROC should work together. Gail and Ken had already met with Ida on this topic and so far there is nothing significant to report.
• The OPAC committee is being reconstituted as the Resource Discovery Systems (ReDS) working group. Gail will continue as liaison to this committee for the duration of her Documentation Committee term.
• The target date for compliance with the Cornell Visual Identity Guidelines is Oct. 28.
• Joanne Leary is visiting as a possible replacement for Carmen in her role as Access Services liaison.

Help page redesign

Ken presented his works in progress. They can be viewed here: http://www.library.cornell.edu/johnson/dev/ken/helptest2.html (Help table of contents), http://www.library.cornell.edu/johnson/dev/ken/helptest4.html (a sample help page).

Comments:

• We’ll need to use whatever the final version of the Gateway banner is.
• We like having the Help TOC launch as a full size, normal web page, no frames.
• We will keep the top level Gateway navigation that Ken added (FindArticles/databases/ejournals, MyLibrary, etc.).
• We want to keep the bread crumbs at the top of Help pages. Maintaining this HTML manually is inconvenient. Ken will see what he can do with Java, but we may need some help.
• We’d like to see how the Help navigation menu that Ken developed for child pages looks on the Help TOC page.

Ken will make some more sample pages for us to review next week. He does not think meeting the Oct. 28 deadline will be a problem.

Print publications updates

• Gaby has completed the MLA and RefWorks handouts. She’ll send these to Gail (as Word documents) and deliver hard copies to the copy shop. Gail will make PDF versions and post them on the DC publications order form.
• Gaby will also send the jpg version of the logo she has been using to the committee. To be consistent, we should all aim to have the insignia be 7/8” in diameter.
• The CUL corner logo that is on some handout is not intended for print.

Other updates

• EJAC: Leah sent some text to be used as a help page on issues regarding electronic access to journals on different campuses. The committee was satisfied with the text, and Gail will create the page and add links per Leah’s suggestions.
• Unicode: There is an LTEF on Unicode on Monday. Amy is working on documentation for Unicode problems.
• Google scholar: Gail showed a draft help page on configuring google scholar for CUL. Comments included adding some notes: Google hasn’t indexed all our holdings, some searches will fail even when we have the item so try the catalog, and that users clicking on a Google scholar link may be asked for payment even when we subscribe. Another suggestion was to include a couple of links to pages that enumerate the pros and cons of Google scholar. This page will be linked to the “Web and Search Engines” page.
• Links to annex page: Maureen pointed out that the Annex has a new web page and the we should update any links in the Help pages. Gail couldn’t find any, but that seems like an omission. Ken will review help pages related to the Annex and add links to the new page as appropriate.
• RSS feeds from licensed resources: these don’t always work. Gail will add a note to this effect on the “Known problems” page.

Next meeting: Friday, Nov. 4, Sage 131. Chair: Ken. Minutes: Camille.