Documentation Committee Meeting Minutes

July 13, 2004

 

In attendance:

Ida Martinez (Co-Chair), Lynn Thitchener (Co-Chair), Gail Steinhart
Minutes: Gail Steinhart

 

Old Business:

 

• Ida, with Amy Blumenthal’s help, created a new help page to address problems with EZproxy. Amy is available to advise on this kind of issue.

 

• Gail created a new web page on file compression, and updated the computer set-up page accordingly.

 

• Ida will email broken Netscape links to us to troubleshoot.

 

• Overview page: Lynn suggested (and we all agreed to) going back to working in pairs to streamline the process.  Lynn and Kizer put the most work into the last round of comments and will work on the page.

 

New business:

 

• Gail noticed the link to get EndNote filters is dead. We decided to borrow the section from Mann’s web page that provides links to Olin’s, Mann’s, and EndNote’s filter pages. Lynn will fix this page.

 

Reports:

 

• Lynn: Maureen saw a demo of TechSmith’s MORAE software at ALA. It’s software for web usability studies that the GCII committee is interested in and it would be useful for us too. Ed Weissman said the documentation and GCII committees should work together on a proposal to purchase it. The software can’t be networked so the proposal may also include a laptop so we have a mobile usability testing work station. Gail will bring this to the attention of the Mann web redesign committee.

 

• Lynn, GCII report: Meeting this morning was to finalize redesign for fall implementation. We will need to pay attention to the left margin links (some borrow text from help pages which will be revised). We should also try to keep language consistent throughout. Lynn would like to see a search help box right on the Gateway page – we would further that cause if we make good progress on the indexing project. She mentioned at the meeting that the documentation committee is interested in redesigning the help page template. Carla DeMello and Maureen are willing to work with us on that and we’ll invite them to one of our meetings. Overall it looks like we have some good opportunities to collaborate with the GCII committee. Unresolved: do we want help pages to open in gateway frames, or should they have a distinct appearance?

 

• Ida, Reconnaissance project: there are still 2000,000 items without LC subject headings that are not in the online catalog. Lynn may include this on the overview page. Links: http://www.library.cornell.edu/cts/recon/graf.htm, http://www.library.cornell.edu/cts/recon/beyond).

 

• Ida, Indexing project: “Search” appears to search subject and description fields in metadata. The index is created only from subject terms. We should think about how this affects the indexing project.  Note that on search results pages, there is a link to “Search Help Tips”, which doesn’t work. We agreed that should be eliminated.

 

Next meeting:

Tuesday, August 31, 2004

2:00 - 3:00 p.m.

Olin 106