In attendance: Ida Martinez (Chair), Lynn Thitchener (Co-Chair), Gail Steinhart, Amy Blumenthal, Carmen Blankinship.

Announcements:

• The A-Z title list, generated as part of the MakeKeyword program, has disappeared. We believe this happened when Ida and Lynn inadvertently ran the MakeKeyword program simultaneously. Keyword searching still works, but the list of terms no longer appears. Lynn suggested that we use this as an opportunity to create a real "title" list, similar to the one that now exists on the main Gateway page, rather than the MakeKeyword generated list. MakeKeyword generated an A-Z list from title words, creating a word list that was sometimes redundant and not very meaningful. Ida will talk to Maureen Morris about the possibility of creating an A-Z title list for Help modeled on the list created for the main Gateway pages.

Completed tasks:

• Ida displayed the new help pages template. Everyone agreed that it looks great.
• Computer Set-Up page: Sidecar has been removed from the test buttons since the information is no longer relevant.
• Ida did some minor editing of Using the WWW to find Internet Sites. Lynn will look over the changes.
• Lynn did some minor editing of the Union Catalogs page, correcting some bad URLs and deleting nonworking telnet connections.
• Gail noticed that the ereserves page still displayed the old Voyager interface. She replaced two images and made some minor text revisions corresponding to the images.
• Gail submitted a list of pages she has reviewed for metadata indexing terms with suggestions for changes. Ida will make the changes.

New tasks:

• Ida asked for input concerning information about the number of libraries, on and off-campus, and the number of libraries represented in the library catalog. This information is found on the Overview page and on the Library Catalog page. Gail suggested some wording. Lynn will edit with the revised wording.
• Amy passed around a print-out showing how the Help TOC page displays when a browser's "display images" setting is turned off . The images, including the bullets, appear as broken image placeholders. This makes the "Search the Help Pages" feature unuseable - there's no button to click, and also no text.
• This raised the issue of images on pages and whether page creators have been using alt = " " (adding alternative text between the quotes) in their source tags.
• Ida mentioned that we will need to identify and change any of the old ILL links that appear in Gateway Help pages. The redirect to the new url will be taken down in about six months. Ida will look into whether it's possible to do a global "search and replace" across all of the help pages.
• Amy mentioned that the link to the telnet catalog, on the Text-Based version of the catalog page, no longer works. We checked the telnet link in Voyager and realized that the issue went beyond the Help pages since this link doesn't work from the catalog either. Amy will alert the appropriate people.
• Ida pointed out that the new Annex Request page on the Library Gateway now conflicts slightly with the library Help page that preceded it. Carmen volunteered to review the text on the link from the main Gateway page and we all agreed that the Help page should simply point to this new Gateway page.
• Amy proposed re-working the tocs under the Technical Support section. She will send a draft to Ida. She also mentioned that the information about ports on the Using Library Resources Off-Campus page needs to be revised to ports 80 and 443. Ida will make the changes.
• Ida asked whether we should include a section on pop-ups (why and how they need to be enabled) in the technical support faqs. Amy mentioned that Paul M. may have workaround that prompts users to enable pop-ups. Amy will pursue this with Paul.
• Find Articles/Find Databases pages are becoming dated. We may need to plan a review of these pages. Lynn volunteered to take a look at Using 'Find it at Cornell' as a start.

Submitted by Lynn Thitchener, 9/29/2004

Next Meeting:
November 1, Monday
1-2 pm
Olin 106