Present: Marlene Laurence, Doug Morton (Recorder), Susan Moskal, Shabiran Rahman, Susan Routliffe (Chair), Mary Stanley, Jackie Stapleton, Linda Teather
Accepted as amended
Linda Teather distributed a couple of examples of CD-ROMs that Systems is having trouble loading. A review of specifications or promotional material before purchase would not have alerted us to the problems.
Linda Teather outlined the reasons for the problems of printing and downloading .pdf files on public workstations. With the current security environment it is necessary to set a workstation to either printing or downloadingfrom Adobe Acrobat Reader, not both. Given the large size of the .pdf files (often much larger than one diskette) and the expectation that users prefer to print rather than download, the decision was made when public printing was first installed to set all public workstations to print only. Maintenance (ie an increasing number of special profile workstations) and use issues (such as users wanting to print from download workstations & vice versa) made it impractical to set some workstations to print only and others to download only.
Because of the changes to workstation profiles and technology changes since the public workstations were first put out Linda Teather said she and the other TUG Systems Managers were convening a task group to conduct a general review of the technical options currently available and recommend how best to deliver services to our in-house public workstations. This would be announced shortly.
A second issue is communicating problems and solutions among Information Desk staff; i.e., whose role is it to communicate, how widespread should the message be spread, and how should the information be kept so it can be referred to in the future. For now, if Systems staff do something they feel needs to be communicated, they will pass the information to Maureen McCormack and Doug Morton, who will be responsible for forwarding the information to Information Services desk staff.
The matter of keeping that information available to ISR staff, to avoid different people calling Systems with questions already answered, will be looked at in a future meeting.
The committee reviewed the summary prepared by Wish Leonard of our responses to the questionnaire. The majority of the ratings were positive and the comments will be taken into account as we continue our work.
The exercise will be repeated in the spring and fall each year.
The questionnaire prepared by Jackie, Maureen and Shabiran was reviewed. Suggestions and comments will be incorporated in the next edition which Jackie and Mary will work on.
Next Meeting
November 7, 2000; Porter