Teeny, tiny subcommittee on User Studies

Maureen and Nan met with Linda Bryan to review the focus group experience from the Library's last exercise. They have decided to establish five focus groups, with students and ideally 15 faculty members. Each of the groups will need a facilitator and recorder. Volunteers from NRRIG gladly accepted. More volunteers are sought. We will use the Gateway announcements space and pizza and cash incentives to attract students for the groups.

New Gateway

Marty Schlabach responded to last week's minutes with the suggestion that we add "directories" to our default categories of default inclusions. We thought that this was a very good idea, so good that we looked at several other categories of inclusions. Marty Kurth's reminder that too much tampering with the current Gateway organization might create unintended consequences with resultant displays encouraged us to cease our additions with "directories" (and perhaps "encyclopedias") However, we may return to this topic after some analysis by Marty and Holly.

On selection of resources for the new Gateway, David urged the group to consider reference, rather than collection development, as the arbiters of what belongs. We decided to include IRPC in our invitation to review the Gateway resources and that we might provide a model of how this would look by:

1. posting selections on the test Gateway at gould.manlib.cornell.edu

2. providing lists of the resources that have been "deselected"

3. inviting selectors and IRPC to review the lists for addition to the new Gateway.

We began work on this exercise by selecting a group of full text resources from the Directories, Encyclopedias, Library Catalogs and Linguistics, Language & Literature subject captions.

Minutes recorded by David Block.

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6/21/01, jwg
rev. 6/22/01, jdl