Documentation Committee Meeting Minutes
1/12/2005

 

In attendance: Gail Steinhart (chair), Lynn Thitchener, Ken Bolton, Kizer Walker, Amy Blumenthal.

Welcome new members:

The committee has two new members -- Ken Bolton, from JGSM, and Jacalyn Spoon, from Adelson Library (Ornithology). Two additional members will be joining us in February -- Megan Perez and Camille Andrews (both, from Olin). The Committee extends a welcome to all of our new members. Lynn and Kizer will rotate of the committee in February and March, respectively.

Reviewed Committee Charge:

New members may want to review the Committee charge on the Documentation Committee web page. A question arose about which Help pages are selected to be made available as PDFs. A list of those pages that are currently available in PDF, as well as in html, is available from the Order handouts link on the Documentation Committee web page.

Liaison to Gateway (GC2) committee:

Ken Bolton volunteered to be the new liaison to the Gateway Committee to replace Lynn.

Gateway moved to the Copia server:

Over the weekend, the Gateway was moved to a new server. During this process, MakeKeyword was broken. This is the mechanism that generates the keywords for the Help search feature. Paul Houle, the programmer for the Gateway, generated a new list by hand. Until further notice, whenever a new page is created, we will need to send a note to Paul Houle (ph18) and Maureen Morris ( mm342) to have it added to the keyword file.

Upcoming changes to Find DB/Articles/e-journals:

The committee started to look at the documentation for Find Articles/Find Databases/Finde e-Journals last semester and made some updates, however, some of the pages may still need work, even in the absence of the impending ENCompass upgrade.

The upgrade is scheduled to happen January 19 at the end of the day. The FA/FD/FJ-OPAC team recognizes that this doesn't give us much time to update documentation. Paul McMillin will demonstrate some of the changes at the IRPC meeting on Monday, January 17th (8:30-10:00 in 106 Olin), so it might be a good idea to go if you can. Gail is also trying to get a list of confirmed changes from Ed and will pass those on when she has them. In the meantime, here is the url for the test server (with the caveat that what is there today may be gone tomorrow):

http://encompass-test.library.cornell.edu:20028/site/index.html

So, we're looking at two types of updates to documentation: changes related to the ENCompass upgrade, and more general improvements that are partially done. Today we agreed that everyone will volunteer to update one, or possibly two, of the affected pages. Some of us have already started, so I've put
those names in, with a ? for people who are rotating off the committee. The affected pages are:

Browsers page:

Amy discussed some ideas she has about reworking the browsers page. She will create a draft to share at the next meeting.

Next Meeting: (tentative)

Friday, February 11, 2005
Time: 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm
106 Olin Library