Documentation Committee Minutes: October 2003

Present: JM, CB, KW, IM, LT, TD

Agenda:

Patron Info and Requests [Kizer]
Off-campus, annotated bibliography, and telnet pages [Ida]
Safari and computer set-up pages [Jaime]
IRPC and new members [Thad]
NetLibrary [Lynn]
Next meeting day/time [Thad]

Notes:

- This is Jaime’s last meeting, as she is leaving Cornell at the end of the month. She will locate the instructions for working with the Manifest File and running Make KeyWord index and include them here. Lynn and Ida will both learn how to run the index, and upload pages.

- The group needs to decide who will take over the website maintenance, and that person will need get the connection from Dreamweaver to the Doc Committee Working directory on Gould. Permissions for this need to be obtained from Mann IT (Bill Klinko).

FTP connection from Dreamweaver for Doc Comm website:

- FTP Host is gould.mannlib.cornell.edu

- Host Directory is /www/gwtng/html/docwg

- The committee also needs to appoint a liaison to the GCII committee (Library Gateway Committee, Maureen Morris is chair).

- The “Creating and Editing Help Pages” document is attached to these minutes. This document includes instructions for working with the Manifest File and running Make KeyWord Index.

Email notification page: index page is unorganized, and content is severely outdated. Carmen and Kaiser will work together to update the information on these pages. Some of them are reminiscent of Notis.
Off campus page: Where it discusses appropriate browsers, it only talks about Netscape and IE. Thad will make the words “appropriate browsers” linked to the Browsers section of the computer set-up page where it talks about all browsers and compatibility with FA/FD.
Annotated Bibliography: example within the APA style guide needs to have one sentence italicized. Thad will do this.
Telnet page: Ida will copy this page to her computer and Jaime will remove the current URL for this from the Mannifest file and re-run the MakeKeyWord index. Ida will then create a new Telnet page that will exist within the Library Catalog section of the Help. The Catalog is the only resource that is still available in Telnet mode.
Jaime has updated the Safari browser page to include information from Paul McMillian’s browser information page. She has also updated the computer set-up page to reflect the changes stated in the minutes of the Sept. meeting.
Thad addressed IRPC at their last meeting to let them know that Mary has rotated off the committee and we are looking for new members. Thad rotates off in February 2004, and Jaime is leaving Cornell at the end of the month. Thad will contact IRPC Steering and ask them how to proceed in regards to recruiting new members..
NetLibrary: Lynn brought up the point that it might be a good idea for us to create a help page for using NetLibrary (e-books). She receives many questions about this at the Olin ref desk, and feels it would be worth it to create a guide. The group agreed, but needed to decide where to put it in the Help index. It was decided that NetLibrary will have it’s own link under Research Tools. Lynn will work on this.
The next meeting will be Wednesday, November 12^th from 1:00 – 2:00pm in Olin 106.

Creating and Editing Gateway Help Pages

Creating a Page from Scratch

· Go to http://ivy.mannlib.cornell.edu/newhelp/makepage.html with Netscape or other web browser

· Fill in the relevant information. Use your name and Documentation Committee as authors

· The Gateway help search engine uses the keyword fields to find pages. Try to use keywords that users will likely use in a search.

· Click on Create Web page.

· Once the page has been created, save it as an html file.

· Open the page in an html editor.

· Make changes (please consult Metadata Tricks below).

· Send the page to the Chair of the Documentation Committee.

Editing an Existing Page

· Deciding whether a page needs editing: edits are the result of content changes, dead links, typos, etc.

· Depending on the extent of the change, editing can be done in two ways:

1. If extensive editing is needed, a member of the Documentation Committee will edit the existing page by:

o Going to the existing help page and saving it as an html file.

o Opening the page in an html editor.

o Making changes.

o Sending the page to the Committee Chair who then puts it on the server using Dreamweaver (see below).

2. If the change is little, it can be done by the Documentation Committee chair directly on the server.

Working with Gateway Help Pages

At present, there is no test Gateway, which may change. Once the Chair of the Documentation Committee receives a new or edited page, they need to:

· Have DreamWeaver installed and configured to connect to the newhelp directory. Access is set up through the Gateway Committee (at present Maureen Morris). The utility used is DAV, not FTP. The directory is http://campusgw.library.cornell.edu/templated/newhelp

· Open DreamWeaver and save the page in the appropriate directory on their local site. Check the metadata and the links and clean up the page if needed. Preview the page in different browsers to make sure that everything is working O.K.

· Connect to the remote site and put the file. In case this is an edited page, it is recommended that an old copy of the file is stored both on the local and remote site. The naming convention is

finding/articles.html_AS_OF_DATE

· If the page is an edited page and no new keywords have been added, there is no need to do anything else.

· If the page is new, it should be listed in a text file called MANIFEST (in the newhelp directory). This file should be opened in a UNIX editor (such as PICO) through Secure Shield. Access to ivy through Secure Shield is set up though Mann ITS (this may change).

· Once the files have been listed in MANIFEST, MakeKeywordIndex needs to be run. To do this, use Netscape to load http://ivy.mannlib.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/help/MakeKeywordIndex.

· Pages with cgi-scripts: Do not edit cgi pages. If any text needs to be changed, contact Mann ITS to request the change.

Metadata Tricks

Formatting

If MakeKeywordIndex finds errors, check the paths that have been typed into MANIFEST since a mistake there will generate an error when MakeKeywordIndex is run. Also, some html editors may interfere with the metatags within the help pages. Make sure that each new metatag appears at the beginning of a line. For example, MakeKeywordIndex will run into trouble if the metatags on a page look like this:

They should look like this:

META name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 3.0">

Keywords and the Help Index

All keywords used in the metadata on a page will appear alphabetically in the Gateway Help Index. If you would like them to appear in a different order, such as having "telnet" appear not only under "telnet but also under confioguration and "browser configuration", type them as follows: "telnet, configuration: telnet, browser configuration: telnet"

IRPC Documentation Committee Web Page

The Documentation Committee Website serves as a central clearinghouse for information on committee activities including meeting minutes, agendas and general membership information. The URL for the page is http://gould.mannlib.cornell.edu/docwg/irpc_documentation_committee.html and it is linked from the CUL StaffWeb page, in the Committees section under Public Services/IRPC. Pages are updated in the standard fashion, by FTPing to the www.gwtng/html/docwg/ directory on the Gould server.

Paper Documentation Process

If there are pages to be distributed in paper, we send a master copy to photocopy services (in paper) and add or delete pages that can be ordered on the form on the Documentation Committee page. Currently, our liaison for the print documentation is Mary Patterson who has the files..

Committee Structure

The Documentation Committee is a sub-committee of IRPC. There is one liaison to the Gateway Committee who attends their meetings, one liaison to the OPAC Team, as well as someone on IRPC-Steering is our liaison there. Currently, this is Angela Horne.