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Web Operational Management Group

Minutes of the Meeting of February 20, 2001
2:00 - 4:00 P.M. Davis Conference Room

Present: Chris Gray, Linda Hastings, Esther Millar (Recorder), Bill Oldfield, Marina Wan (Facilitator), Charles Woods

  1. Approval of notes of the meeting of Feb. 13, 2001
    Approved as distributed.

  2. Agenda Review
    1. Add Thank you to IST staff for Dreamweaver training to #3.
    2. Add Proxy Help as #10

  3. Staff Training
    1. Thanks to IST
      Marina will send a note of thanks to the IST staff members who were involved in Dreamweaver training for the Library. She will also let them know that we are surveying our staff for feedback on the training sessions and we will share the results with them.
    2. Supplementary material
      Linda will create a new page for Site Maintainers. The file will be located in our webops directory and we'll point to it from our Web Operational Maintenance Group page. For now, this page will link to the Functional Groups documents, the Web Maintenance Listserv page, and online tutorials for Dreamweaver.
      Chris reviewed the material covered in the training courses and compared it to the training requirements that had been outlined by the Operations Maintenance Group in their report under recommendations for staff training. Our recent training sessions missed some key elements. He compiled a list of sites that are resources for practical help and consciousness-raising about Web standards. We agreed that it's important for staff to understand why some of these things are important. Chris will consider how this can be done.
      Marina, Esther, and Linda will prepare a web page to outline simple procedural steps and standards web maintainers should follow on our UW Library web pages.
    3. Questionnaire
      Charles' list of questions were approved with several changes. He will distribute the survey to web maintainers via the webmaint listserv. He will wait until after an initial welcome message goes out to the group before he sends his survey.

  4. Webmaint-l: management, monitoring, etc.
    Esther will send out an initial message to welcome members to the listserv and to outline the purposes of the listserv. Marina will respond to all messages that are sent to webmaint-l as well as to our e-mail alias LibWebOps@library.

  5. Website policies and procedures
    Marina, Esther, and Linda will prepare (see 3b). We will not worry about metadata for now.

  6. Web Standards
    1. HTML 4.01
      If we ask staff to adhere to a certain standard, we need to provide them with the appropriate tools to validate their work. Bill will look at appropriate programs, e.g., HTML_Tidy.
      Linda will send Bill information of a program that checks links as well as validating the code.
    2. xhtml
      Developments indicate that this is the direction html is moving. But this is down the road. Although there are no immediate changes to be made in this regard, eventually we'll need to set a standard to adhere to.
    3. metadata
      Metadata will have major impacts in future developments. For now members should just keep aware of the issues surrounding metadata.

  7. Site-wide maintenance procedures
    Esther did an experiment to see what is involved in bringing our entire web site to the local site on her PC in order to use Dreamweaver to make site-wide changes. A transfer of the entire site took 3 hours and about .9 GB of disk space. Because the transfer would pause when error messages occurred, and would not resume until a decision was made, she had to monitor the entire process. In two weeks, she will see how long it takes to synchronize the site (only bring down those files that have changed since the last transfer). Meanwhile she will investigate why error messages occurred and what can be done to eliminate them so the process can run overnight without monitoring.

    The cgi-bin area is still assigned under the old system to the www group. Charles and Esther will review ownership of files in this area and bring a recommendation on how group assignment should be made under our new system.

  8. Use statistics software
    Bill provided some history on what was done in the past and what IST is making available now, and then reported on some programs he is familiar with: wwwstat, Accesswatch, WebTrends. He had prepared a handout outlining requirements, goals, questions, and proposals for collecting web statistics for our web sites.

    Since Bill will be gone for several weeks, Charles suggested that others may wish to do more research into this area. This discussion will continue at our next meeting.

  9. Issues on Dreamweaver 4 - deferred to next meeting

  10. Proxy Help - deferred to next meeting

  11. Next Meeting
    Tuesday, March 13; 2-4 pm; Porter Conference Room 428
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July 15, 2005