Instruction/Reference Program Committee (IRPC) Meeting Minutes, 10/21/02

1. Announcements: Paul McMillan was introduced (and welcomed back) as the new member of IRIS.

2. ENCompass: Project web site is at http://www.library.cornell.edu/cts/encompass, including an extensive FAQ section. Karen explained that Release 3.0 of the ENCompass software should be available early 2003 and this should include requested enhancements and fixes to problems that the team has uncovered. They are aiming for a Summer 2003 production release of the "e-ref collection" using ENCompass. Nan Hyland proceeded with a demo of this product and explained some of the decisions that have been made regarding the interface. Results of user testing have greatly influenced these decisions and more user testing will be done in November. What to include as tabs, whether to limit the number of "hits" when searching for articles in multiple databases at once (to increase speed of search), and which databases to include as part of the mulitiple database searching feature were among items discussed and questions being addressed by the team. Volunteers will be needed to help with testing, help text, documentation, and training. Project team may be e-mailed at encompass-l@cornell.edu.

3. FACTIVA: Lynn Brown highlighted important changes since the transition from Dow Jones Interactive to Factiva. She pointed out the guide that the Management Library has created and made available from their web site http://www.library.cornell.edu/jgsm. You can find Factiva and the guide in the "Top Business Databases" section. The Company Quick Search is a nice new feature as well as the ability to search "all content" more easily. There was discussion about whether to include the Factiva titles on the e-journals title list (since Serials Solutions can provide the information) even though the database cannot currently be used with the Netscape browser. The group seemed to agree that the titles should be included -- the reasoning is that users would rather know that the title is available even if it requires switching browsers than to miss getting the full text of an article online because they didn't know it was available.

4. Web Tutorials: Susanne Whitaker announced that the Gateway committee is looking to add web tutorials to the Instruction section of the web site and is interested in having tutorials from each library. This is still in the discussion stage, and the discussion includes questions such as what constitutes a tutorial, if subject guides will be included, and how the information will be organized (alphabetically or by subject).

5. IRPC Organization chart: deferred until the next meeting

6. Learning and Teaching with Technology Expo: Tony Cosgrave announced that this will take place January 16-17, 2003. He referred to Oya Rieger's October 17th message outlining the goals of the Expo and listing the CUL members of the Planning Group.

7. Next IRPC meeting: November 18th, 2002