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Web Operational Management Group

Minutes of the Meeting of October 29, 2003
1:30 pm, Davis Conference Room

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

  1. Minutes of Meeting, Oct. 15, 2003
    Deferred until next meeting.

  2. Business Arising
    1. Chris has fixed the problem with the drop-down menus behaving strangely on several pages (e.g., undergrad page and proxy page). There was a conflict in anchor names. Both the navbar and the pages used the same names (i.e., help) for anchors. Chris renamed all the anchors in the navbar by adding "_nb" to the end of each name, to prevent this kind of conflict from happening again.
    2. The updated UW Library navigation bar now appears on all TUG pages. Bill still needs to update the navbar for the Google Index.
    3. New TUG drop down menus are now working and have been distributed to the necessary resources.

  3. Agenda Review
    Co-op Term Project - Progress Report moved to #4.

  4. Co-op Term Project - Progress Report
    Mike reported on the following:
    • he has been implementing CSS in the access2 directory for Janet Wason
    • he provided training to Cheryl Kieswetter on validating pages to XHTML and reviewing pages for accessibility issues
    • recently he has been validating the pages in the "newsatlib" and "seagrams" directories.
    • he added a summary page to his tutorials
      (See Mike's web site at: http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/~ypwang/)
    • the Library's footer statements use an absolute font size, rather than the relative font size recommended for accessibility purposes, so Esther has updated sse_footer2.html to meet the guidelines.

  5. Dreamweaver MX 2004
    Priorities for installation: The Group reviewed the suggested list provided by Esther and approved it with several changes. Esther will forward the list to Carl.
    Training: We will discuss training issues after we have had a chance to work with the new version of Dreamweaver ourselves. Esther will ask Carl to install Dreamweaver MX 2004 for WebOps members in the next week so we can have a chance to assess it for our next meeting.
    ACTION: Esther

  6. TUG Electronic Reference and Internet Search Tools
    The database version of the TUG Electronic Reference Collection is now live. Because the Internet Search Tools page has a close relationship with this database, Bill has prepared a prototype that incorporates Internet Search Tools into the database as well. It is presently being evaluated by the Internet Search Tools group.
    Several points were raised in discussion:
    • Charles raised the concern regarding the ability to gather use statistics from the databases and Bill demonstrated the statistics available from: ereference.uwaterloo.ca/stats/ .
    • It was also noted that these dynamic pages are not indexed by Google.
    • Bill noted the need to work at reducing the number of copies of our navbars that are required to be distributed to the various services we provide dynamically. We must also remember:
      • all navbars need absolute references
      • javascripts need to have absolute references
      • we need to use navbar=uw to get the UW navbar
      • we were reminded to always "get" any file before editing to ensure that we are working on the most recent version
    • We noted that all web maintainers need to be reminded about remembering to "get" a file before editing. ACTION: Esther will send a message out to webmaint-l shortly.

  7. WebOps Minutes on the Web
    Several links to minutes are missing. ACTION: Esther will send out an e-mail request to WebOps members to try and locate the missing minutes.

  8. Review of Project "Quick Links"
    The "Quick Links" buttons on the right side of the Library Web's home page were reviewed to determine the best configuration when adding a new button for "Ask A Librarian." Members were pleased with the administration of the survey conducted by Michele and Marina. Marina noted that Michele conducted interviews of 10 minutes or less with 11 random undergrads (from Porter & UMD) in which she asked specific questions pertaining to the buttons on the right. Only 3 prototypes were presented.

    The #1 choice was selected because the simple order and uniform size of the buttons were considered to look more organized and be more welcoming. Though it was noted that there are too many buttons. The suggestion was made to provide more descriptive <alt> text for the buttons and Doug provided the enhanced text. "Ask A Librarian" was placed as the first button to make it more prominent. In keeping with requests from the participants, "your library account" and "course reserves" were placed next.

    Michele will provide a more detailed written report on the Community Needs Assessment web page.

  9. Around the Table
    Marina has an article titled "A Strategy for Archiving Web Sites at the National Library" that looks at various Canadian web sites. Please contact Marina if you are interested in reading it.
    Esther and Marina are meeting with Mike on Tuesday, November 4 to conduct a mid-term review.
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July 14, 2005