In attendance:
Ida Martinez (Chair), Lynn Thitchener, Kizer Walker, Carmen Blankinship, Gail Steinhart
Minutes: Ida Martinez

Announcements:
We welcomed Gail Steinhart to our committee.

Old Business:

• Ida met with Carmen and deleted all the Catalog FAQ help pages that were no longer necessary (out of date). Committee will explore ways to repopulate this page with relevant FAQs about the catalog. We might consider sending a message to IRPC-L or Lynn can ask circulation staff during one of the joint Olin Reference-Olin Circulation staff meetings.

• Ida, Lynn, and Kizer have made good strides towards fixing the metadata in the help pages so that MakeKeywordIndex does not generate errors. Lynn is still looking into one page about call numbers. Ida and Lynn will also add metadata to the wireless page. Ida's assigned pages are fixed. Kizer encountered one problem page that Ida will delete from the server. The rest of Kizer's corrections will be applied soon.

• Ida updated the Creating & Editing Gateway Help Pages instructions & information sheets. She also established a link to this information from the Documentation Committee home page. If anything is unclear or if anything needs editing, committee members should let Ida know.

• No report from Kizer on the Personalized Electronic Services Working Group (MyLibrary). Group did not meet. He will ask them about the MyLibrary help page anomalies at the next meeting and report back to us.

• No report from Lynn on the Gateway Committee II meeting. We look forward to a report at the next meeting.

New Business:

• Marty Kurth sent the committee an e-mail asking that help pages be updated to reflect the e-Journals title list to 26,000 (from 20,000). Committee discussed the need to report the number of e-Journals on help pages. It was decided that we will omit reporting the number of e-Journal titles on help pages. Ida will identify pages where the number of e-Journals appear and make appropriate edits.

• Gateway Committee chair Maureen Morris received an e-mail from a patron requesting that the term "copyright" and a definition be added to our Help glossary. Ida will contact Fiona Patrick for a definition and will add this term. It was suggested by a committee member that "intellectual property" also be included. Ida will ask Fiona about this as well.

• Lynn is finishing up the HTML version of a new guide for MLA citations. When she's done, she will forward her final HTML version to Kizer. He will use the information to create a Word document version for print handouts at reference desks. He will also make the Word document into a pdf file for posting to the Help pages.

• Committee discussed the Overview & Clarification page at length. It's difficult to keep up with the numbers being reported. It's also difficult to determine the source for the numbers. Is this page necessary? Is the information contained on this page more appropriate for a Gateway page?
  • Lynn suggested we look at the CUL informational brochure for wording that might be more appropriate for an "overview and clarification" page. She also suggested talking to the GCII committee about transferring this information to one of their pages -- perhaps the About the Library page.
  • Kizer suggested we eliminate the Overview & Clarification page but use/adapt the information in "overview" paragraphs at the beginning of each of the "Research Tools" pages.
  
  
• Committee discussed the design and look of the Gateway Help pages. Gail pointed out that nowhere does a CUL or CU logo appear on any of the pages. We looked at the Gateway template where both logos appear in the footer of each templated page. We should do the same or something similar for Help. Ida will ask Maureen about redesigning the Help template to see what is involved. We considered a template similar to the Gateway template. Ida demonstrated how Help pages can be forced into the Gateway template when Help is opened in a new window directly from the Gateway. She will ask about the technology that drives this.

For future consideration:

• Look through the glossary for any necessary updates.
• Mete out all help pages to members for careful review of subject terms in metadata (goal: get the index/search terms streamlined, clean, crisp). Are the indexed terms appropriate? user-centered? etc?
• Investigate why some help pages being with ivy.mannlib instead of campusgw.library. (RESOLVED 4-14-04)
• gnu zip compression page needs to be updated.
• Members should bring ideas about the Overview & Clarification page to our next meeting
• Members should bring ideas about the design of Help pages (template) to our next meeting to continue the discussion

  Next meeting:
May 12, 2004
361 Mann Library
11:00am - 12:00noon