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Information Services Management Committee

Ad Hoc Publications Group
Report to ISMC
April 2001

Background

ISMC recently initiated a discussion about the format of the How To and Titles series publications. After considering the pros and cons of both the PDF and HTML formats, they concluded that the usual format for presentation on the UW Library Web will be HTML. PDF will still be available for special circumstances when required.

ISMC also decided that the two present series, How To and Titles, will be amalgamated into one series. Numbering for individual items will be retained.

ISMC asked Helena Calogeridis, Yulerette Gordon, and Esther Millar to form an ad hoc publications group to consider the following questions and to make recommendations to ISMC:

Recommendations

New Series Name:
We recommend a simple, general series name: Library Guide

Review of Existing Publications
In order to determine how many publications would be involved in the conversion, Helena and Yulerette asked their fellow ISR members to identify which of their publications will continue and which should be slated for deletion. Based on the results of this survey, an Excel file was created that lists all continuing publications with pertinent information about each one.

Converting from two series (Titles and How To) to one series (Library Guide)

  1. The two series (How To and Titles) will be combined into one series (Library Guides). The Library Guides page will organize the titles under broad discipline categories. The Subject Acces page will then be discontinued.

  2. For consistency, we recommend that publication titles be simplified (e.g., Finding a Book Review) and, when appropriate, renamed to force like titles to appear together alphabetically (e.g., rename American History to History: American and Canadian History to History: Canadian). The Ad Hoc Publications Group will assign new titles and publish a list of the new titles for compilers to approve for their own publications. Compilers will then be given a week to approve the new titles or to provide suggestions for their own publications.

  3. All publications will receive an initial formatting edit to:
    • Simplify the publication's title
    • Change the headings "Titles" and "How To" to "Library Guide"
    • Provide the new series number
    • Save to a new file name that reflects the new series, e.g., guides#.pdf
      This means that in this initial phase, publications in PDF format will be reissued in PDF format under the new series.
    • When publications were originally placed on the Web, we maintained two copies, the WordPerfect or Word version, and a version we converted into HTML. When the decision was made to maintain only one version, and the PDF format was selected, the old HTML version was no longer needed. Esther saved the original HTML versions anyway. There are quite a number of those files that still contain current information since the publications have not been updated since that time. For those files the initial edit will also include:
      - adding the server-side include statement for the navigation bar
      - correct the footer information to include: compiler's name and position title, last reviewed date, compiler's e-mail address, Ask Us/Tell Us link (instead of asklib e-mail address), copyright information, as well as removing navigation references to UWELib and UWinfo
      - saving to a new file name that reflects the new series, e.g., guides#.html

      We anticipate that this initial edit could be completed within 2 weeks.

  4. There is a group of 7 general titles that currently appear in almost all 44 discipline areas. (See: one example) One of these titles is slated for deletion; four are already in HTML format; only two need to be converted into HTML. Since changing the URLs and titles for these publications will time consuming, we would like to handle all changes to them only once. Therefore, we recommend that the final two general publications be converted in HTML before moving on to step 5.

  5. When all the publications have received the initial edit, and the 2 general publications mentioned above have been converted into HTML, the new series will be made live:
    • This will have to be done as a blitz. We would like to assign one week for this task.
    • During that time we will request that all Web work is halted in the discipline areas while all the web links are changed.
    • When all the new links are in place, the old series files will be deleted.
    • a customized "The page cannot be found" page will be created directing inquiries to any files previously in the /howto/ and /titles/ directories to go to the main Library Guides page.

  6. We will then begin converting all files from PDF into HTML, beginning with the most recently-revised publications first.
    • as each publication is converted from PDF into HTML, all links to that publication will be updated
    • sample publication

Time Frames
We hope to have the entire project completed for the fall term, if not before.

Some Technical & Other Details

Last updated: May 17, 2001
Helena Calogeridis, Yulerette Gordon, Esther Millar
Information Services Management Committee
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November 15, 2005