Minutes of the Meeting of November 16, 2005
1:30 - 3:00 pm, Dana Porter Conference Room
Present:Christy Branston, Marian Davies,Chris Gray, Esther Millar, Bill
Oldfield, Marina Wan (Facilitator), Charles Woods (Recorder)
Regrets: Linda Hastings
- Minutes of meetings of Oct 11 and Nov 2.
Approved, with minor corrections. Bill will repair egregious numbering errors in the meeting of October 11.
- Business Arising
2.7 SFX/WorldCat options
Bill will attend the next IRMC meeting to discuss SFX/WorldCat options
4. Graphics site for staff
Marian implemented an Images link on the Webops site: http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/staff/webmaint/
images.html . The group discussed the feasibility of the delivery of these images via a database methhod. Marina and Esther will outline their requirements for such a system, including designation of categories such as authors and subjects.Bill/Chris will investigate a means of creating a db automatically from the current site.
6. WebOps Terms of Reference
These are yet in draft form.
8. Around the table
The Staff Homepage review will be done by Rachel Caldwell and Sandra Keys.
- LibWebReview
Marina highlighted items from two previous LibWebReview meetings.
- Agenda Review
Marina added "Search Engine on Subject Guides" as agenda item "5".
- Search Engine on Subject Guides
Marina demonstrated an option to search subject guides (see the bottom of http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/discipline
/discipline_search.html ) and asked the group if it was useful. The group agreed that unless the subsequent searches could be made to reflect the domain of the previous searches then this option was actually misleading, the domain of searches is suddenly expanded to all of UWor all of Google. Bill volunteered to look at some options to solve the problem.
- RSS on Subject Guides.
Chris demonstrated possibilites for using RSS feeds on library subject pages. RSS feeds are useful for sites that add allot of information frequently; the information can be displayed in blog-like structure, with most recent events first. A site can also produce an XML file that contains summaries of each news story that can provide an RSS feed to other sites and to RSS readers. Bloglines.com was demonstrated as an aggregator of blogs and newsfeeds:
How Does Bloglines Work?
Bloglines is a "news aggregator." Many online information sources, including web sites, weblogs and news services, now broadcast their content to the web in so-called "syndicated feeds" or "news feeds" with new technologies like Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and ATOM. News aggregator software and services collect those syndicated feeds and present them to end users in a variety of ways.
Bloglines is a server-based aggregation system. This means that we run and manage all of the software and technologies necessary to collect the syndicated feeds from tens of millions of online information sources on our own computer servers and databases, and deliver that amazing content to you as a free, easy-to use online service.
After you join Bloglines you simply search for the content you are interested in and identify the feeds you want to track. Once you "subscribe" to those feeds (a single-click maneuver in most cases), Bloglines will constantly check those feeds for changes or additions and direct new information onto your Bloglines personal page. "
The group also looked at a couple of library sites that use RSS feeds, including McMaster. See the RSS feeds at http://library.lib.mcmaster.ca/php/blog.php?id=207&display=full
The group agreed that the potential of RSS feeds to the library site should be investigated:
- Chris will investigate software options
- Bill will investiage the potential of providing an RSS update-feed wrt to recent updates to the Ejournals database
- Charles will forward informationa about an Endeavor site's build of an RSS feed for the Voyager New-Book report
- Christy will investigate the application of RSS feeds at other academic libraries.
- "Give us feedback" form - do you want to see the replies?
The group agreed to receive the replies to this form for now.
- Next Meeting
The November 30 meeting was cancelled subsequent to this meeting. The next meeting will be December 14 in the Dana Porter Conference room.
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December 13, 2005
