Minutes of the Meeting of April 16, 2003
1:00 pm, Davis Conference Room
Present: Chris Gray, Linda Hastings, Esther Millar (Recorder), Bill Oldfield, Marina Wan (Facilitator), Charles Woods
- Minutes of Meeting, March 17, 2003
Minutes accepted with changes.
- Business Arising
5. "Ask a Librarian" image - Paul and Marina reported to the Virtual Reference Group that we will not be placing an "Ask a Librarian" image on the Library's home page. It will only appear on lower level pages, thus leaving more flexibility for design purposes.
6. Staff Web text drop downs - To move forwards in ensuring that all of our web pages will validate as HTML 4.01 transitional, the following will take place: ACTION: Esther will continue to remove all references to margin codes in the <body> tags of files in the Staff Web area; ACTION: Linda will validate the Staff Web home page and server-side include navigation bar for standards compliance.
- Agenda Review
9. UMD Page Redesign
- Dreamweaver sftp
The TRELLIS servers are being made more secure through the adoption of SSH enabled clients and where possible dropping ftp and telnet services. Dreamweaver users on lap2 publish their changes through ftp. Dreamweaver MX can be set up to utilize sftp. Charles' and Esther's machines will be used for testing purposes.
ACTION: Charles will arrange for Joe to set up Esther's machine and will ask Joe to write up instructions for configuring Dreamweaver MX.
- Co-op Student Projects
ISR has prepared a co-op project: Usability Review of UW Library's Secondary Pages. It refers to meeting "the principles including following UW's Gold Standard." The Gold Standard does not apply to secondary pages. But we recommend that pages meet our UW Library Web Standards and Guidelines.
Depending on how various co-op proposals are approved, there may be room for cooperation between WebOps and ISR.
After some discussion we agreed on a project with the following elements:
- validate our web pages to HTML 4.01 Transitional
- analyze our site, finding commonalities between pages, that would be beneficial as we look at how to apply cascading style sheets to the Library Web site
- validate our web pages for accessibility (validate through "Bobby")
- the position would not just analyze, but would include an educational component to teach web maintainers how to ensure their pages meet both HTML and accessibility standards
- the incumbent would require solid experience with HTML
ACTION: Bill will preprare a job description and scope.
- WebOps Priorities
We decided that our categorization of priorities is sufficient for our current needs. (See the minutes of February 19, item #4.)
Charles commented that he would like to experiment with Power Cubes to provide statistics. After Bill moves the proxy to the Pilot machine, the logs coming from Library will be a more reasonable size to experiment with in this manner. ACTION: Charles will scope out timelines to determine what will be involved.
- Library resources "feature" on Library homepage
The group agreed to add this feature to the home page:
- IRMC would create a feature page for us to link to - we see this as a unique page to promote the resource
- the link would remain on the home page for 2 weeks before it is removed
- it is acceptable to have periods when no resource is featured
- Library home page re-design
Further discussion is required on home page re-design but we did agree to proceed with the new navigation bar on the home page and for the server-side include statement. ACTION: Linda will create new navigation bars using Fireworks/Dreamweaver MX and will ensure they validate as HTML 4.01 Transitional.
- UMD Page Redesign
The group reviewed the new design and sidebar created by Peter Johnson. We had a few concerns regarding the usability of the sidebar. The group suggested that Peter try using "click on" instead of "mouse over" for the Cartographic Collection and Architecture Collection headings. ACTION: Members will review the new page (http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/locations/umd.html) and send any further concerns to Esther (who will forward them to Peter). Paul will forward URLs illustrating other ways to achieve the same effect on the sidebar.
- Around the Table
Bill provided the URLs to two test pages:
http://journal-indexes.uwaterloo.ca/index.cfm?navbar=uw
http://etheses.uwaterloo.ca/OAI/TestPage.cfm
Marina noted that she now has the book on Google Hacks and hopes to review it for a future IST training session or a tips sheet. If you wish to take a look at it, please let her know.
If you have any queries or concerns about this page, please contact .
November 8, 2005
