Documentation Committee Meeting
July 9, 2005

Present: Ken Bolton, Carmen Blankenship, Amy Blumenthal, Gaby Castro Gessner, Camille Andrews
Minutes: Camille Andrews

Welcome of Gaby Castro Gessner
We welcomed Gaby the as new member of the committee, stepping into the position Megan Perez vacated. Gaby has graciously agreed to be the copy shop liaison. Some of the paper guides were recently revised (Find e-Journals, Find Articles, Find databases); however, others have not been used for some time as far as anyone knows. Some libraries (particularly Olin) still do put out paper guides; however, Gaby notes that Olin’s do not see much circulation.

There was some discussion as to the usage of the Help pages in general (Amy and Gaby said they were used by tech support and Olin Reference) and a suggestion was made to check the website statistics using a tool like Lydia Pettis’ WebTracker and to increase the awareness of the Help pages (perhaps through marketing on the Gateway). Ken will talk to Maureen about this.

Charge
Committee reviewed changes to charge (and the website) in the wake of the PSEC reorganization and made additional suggestions/edits:

• Change the last amended date
• Change the website header and the places where it is still listed as the IRPC Documentation Committee
• Change Amy Blumenthal’s title to Technical Support Liaison
• Perhaps move the Documentation Committee website under the new PSC website
• Check how the CommonSpot implementation affects the site in general
• Carmen suggested that the updated charge be taken to PSEC by the PSEC liaison to the Documentation Committee. Ken or Gail will see to this as well as the changes above.

There was also some question of where the minutes go. Carmen suggested that they go to CU-LIB, following a particular template in the subject line.

Discussion of the design of the Help pages
Ken asked us to consider what changes we might make to improve the design and usability of the Help pages. Suggestions were as follow:

• Changing from a frames-based design. Frames present problems with accessibility guidelines, create persistent headers even when you navigate away from the Help pages (e.g. Gateway Help header stays when you go to Refworks), make bookmarking and printing difficult, and are generally deprecated. We can achieve the same effect with Dreamweaver templates. Gail and Ken discussed with Maureen as well and she is OK with their removal. Ken will follow up with her.
• Changing header to include new logo (as was done on Gateway banner which we all liked). We will ask Maureen if we can use the Gateway banner header.
• We generally liked the clean design of the pages (though they are a bit plain)
• We didn't think there was much missing except for perhaps more information on firewall issues and the exception with sponsor issue (which was discussed again and is being discussed in other circles in conjunction with GuestID). From a reference point of view, only instruction, not help pages, will really answer individualized questions.
• Thought perhaps the addition of dropdown menus with the 5 or 6 most popular queries (How do I... Find an article? etc) taken from FAQ would be useful
• redundant pages: In some cases (e.g., Library-to-Library Delivery, Library Annex) two different pages from Gateway and Gateway Help have the same information (and appear to be autolinked since updating one will automatically update the other). Though perhaps this was done to preserve the look and feel, we felt it was confusing to patrons (and us) and we suggested that there be only one page and all links will point to it. If it will take the patron to another section of the website this will be indicated by an offsite notation and the link will open in a new window (not a pop-up but a full new window).
• On the Library Annex page we noted a misspelling (videso) and we found an error in the Library Annex request for a title Canadian Diplomat.which was reported to LIBIT-L.

Next meeting: Friday, August 12, in 135 Sage. Minutes: Gail.