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Library Web Review Group

Notes of Meeting of February 14, 2005
Davis Conference Room

Present: Christy Branston, Helena Calogeridis, Marian Davies, Linda Hastings, Sandra Keys, Esther Millar (recorder), Marina Wan (chair)

Regrets: Rachel Caldwell

  1. Notes of meeting held February 2, 2005
    • Deferred. Minutes not yet available.

  2. Business Arising
    • usability studies will be delayed until a later stage (Mark Haslett, Susan Routliffe, Shabiran Rahman, and Jim Parrott have been notified)

  3. Agenda Review
    • add as #4: New Member, and renumber accordingly

  4. New Member
    • Dan Sich is joining the group, providing representation from Davis Reference.

  5. New UW Web guidelines
    • Esther showed the group the new templates for the UW Common Look and Feel. Sample pages and documentation are available at: http://web.uwaterloo.ca/ (Note: this is a new URL.) She outlined what is mandatory and optional.

  6. Possibilities for usability studies
    • we reviewed the purpose of focus groups and usability studies. One source noted that focus groups are appropriate as an initial tool for fact-finding, but does not replace usability studies
    • the group noted three areas we see as important: content, navigation, and terminology
    • after some discussion we agreed on the following process:
      1. define a mission statment for the web site
        - look at how our users use the web site
        - draw on previous studies
        - look at what we provide, what is available
        - look at other library sites
      2. Prepare drafts
      3. Do usability studies

        At our next meeting we will begin preparing a survey. Christy will review existing web surveys for possible questions for our survey. She will bring these to our next meeting.

  7. Usability study on database web pages
    • at WebOps Marina and Christy suggested that our group could do a usability study on the database pages. We will incorporate this into our general review outlined above.

  8. Around the Table
    • no items

Next Meeting
Tuesday, February 22, 1:30 - 3:00 pm. Porter 428.


August 11, 2005