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Web Operational Management Group

Minutes of the Meeting of December 14, 2005
1:30 - 3:00 pm, Porter Conference Room

Present: Christy Branston , Chris Gray, Esther Millar, Bill Oldfield (Recorder), Marina Wan (Facilitator), Charles Woods, Marian Davies

Regrets: Linda Hastings,

1.Minutes of Meeting, November 16, 2005

Approved with minor changes.

2. Business Arising

2.4  A report will be presented at the next meeting.

7. There is no need to distribute the replies to WebOps members.

3. Agenda Review

Item 4 was repositioned to item 6.

4. Revised "Connect from Home -- Helpful Information"

The new "Connect from Home" page was reviewed (http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/proxy/). An image of the address box with the proxy url showing was suggested to avoid the problem with people not understanding the term "address box".

The GoScript with the addition of SFX has changed the proxying environment. An OpenURL strategy might now be possible which could also be used in TRELLIS. Because of this situation it was proposed that a comprehensive review of the situation be undertaken by WebOps

5. Use of the UW Connect button

Chris introduced a Connect From Home bookmarklet.  A bookmarklet is essentially a book mark that incorporates JavaScript and runs a script in the browser window.  In this instance the bookmarklet would take people to the proxy login and then return them to their original page.

The proposed instruction page was reviewed (http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/proxy/UWConnect.html). The instructions relate only to the IE and Firefox browsers. This raised the question about browser support which was deferred to another meeting.

6. RSS feed

Chris took the group through an introduction to the setting up of an RSS feed. There are a number of ways and he trialed an approach used at W3C which contains detailed instructions (http://www.w3.org/2000/08/w3c-synd/).

Chris demonstrated a copy of the News@Your Library page that was set up for RSS feeds. Minor adjustment in the style sheets and it can be made to look exactly like the current page (http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/newsatlib/home.html). This set up would allow Library clients to set up an RSS feed which would deliver the latest news from the Library automatically.  The news could be delivered either article by article or in the once a month format.

Other areas of possible application could be new Books, New Ejournals, Indexes of E-Reference items.

McMaster has an elaborate RSS feed setup which might be a slight overkill. Statistic Canada now has an RSS feed for their information. Chris will examine the underlying Javascript used to deliver the W3C system to see about modifying it for use on our pages using the Statistics Canada feed for the prototype. Esther and Chris will look into setting up a New @ Your Library RSS.

7. Linkbot Testtube problems

The testtube ERM resource link mentioned by Tim Ireland was not a broken link but a non-Waterloo resource which returned a ColdFusion error page.  Relating to his other question about going through all the redirects, according to the Linkbot page instructions only "Permanent redirects should be updated to the new location of the file."

The discussion of redirects lead to the question of acquiring a newer version of the Linkbot program.  One new version did not have a web publishing capability which is essential for Waterloo but newer versions may have solved this problem.  Esther will look into the newer versions to see if it is time to upgrade.

8. Contribute and requests for Dreamweaver

The problem encountered with Contribute encoding urls containing urls which breaks the link on the published page has opened the problem of user access to the Library web site.  Currently the entire site is owned by the account WebMaint with a user group of webmaint. This provides the control needed by WebOps over access to our site. Using Dreamweaver and then publishing through Contribute does not solve the url encoding problem.  Chris Gray mentioned a potential strategy to solve this problem. Chris will report at our next meeting on the viability of this solution.

9. WebOps membership

WebOps will define membership in the New Year.

10. Around the Table

Christy reported that several librarians are actively promoting their MSN Chat IDs including Dan Sich, Jane Forgay, Christy, and Mark Polger. These ID addresses will eventually be added to the liaison librarian contact page.

Esther mentioned that she will be deleting the standards directory on the web, but will be adding the content to the Contribute FAQ file.

Marina reported on a discussion regarding content management systems from a WATITIS session that she attended. Jesse Rogers explained at the session that the campus is NOT currently investigating content management systems.

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June 23, 2010