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Web Operational Management Group

Minutes of the Meeting of May 30, 2006
1:30 - 3:30 pm, Porter Conference Room

Present: Christy Branston, Chris Gray, Esther Millar, Bill Oldfield (Recorder), Marina Wan (facilitator), Dan Sich, Charles Woods, Rachel Caldwell

Regrets: Linda Hastings

The meeting was a joint meeting of WebOps and the LibWebReview Groups. 

Pre-Meeting with Jesse Rodgers

Jesse Rodgers from Communications & Public Affairs was invited to the meeting to discuss the current state and any plans for the University's CLF (Common Look and Feel).

A few questions were presented about the CLF and the discussion was far ranging.

When is the next design change?

The answer was hopefully, never again. Currently 80% of the University departments have converted to CLF. For the 20% that haven't changed to the CLF, expertise and resources are a big issue and UW Web Ops has helped where they can. In many cases no one is directly responsible for the content of those sites or the person that is can not make the web site a priority.

Portals like CMS (Content Management Systems) are like boxes with very little flexibility and almost impossible to implement in a decentralized environment.

With most of the University now operating reasonably efficiently using a template with CSS control, the plan is incremental changes guided by usability studies so that the UW site can evolve over time.

What changes are expected?

A new Daily Bulletin will be introduced tomorrow with the CLF and some other changes to improve the efficiency of the process.

On June 20th there will be an announcement about the University's 50th Anniversary. A logo is being worked on and other potential changes to celebrate the occasion.

Is our understanding of the operation of the CLF correct? What are the limits of customization that remain within the scope of the CLF?

The CLF is open for customization. We can adjust it as we need and want with minimal restrictions. The top of the page including the logo, search box, title bar and site name (i.e. the wordmark - 'the Library') as well as the bottom footer are the only areas with any restriction if the CLF stqandard is to be maintained.  Within these constraints any changes are allowed, of course, within the confines of good taste. Colours, images fonts and even positioning below the header and above the footer are open for change which can be handled efficiently using an attached CSS.

A flash image, which can be created through a web page at Graphics, will facilitate the change of colour of the wordmark or site name with a mouseover. This can solve the problem of users not being aware that the wordmark is a link back to a sites homepage.

The fact that aliases with and without "www" should be established for every site, was mentioned in passing.

Although there is a CSS media type for mobile devices, it is ignored by some and used by others. It has not yet become a common standard.

A 800 by 600 screen resolution still dominates. Jesse stated that they are no longer supporting the IE 5.5 browser. He also said that he likes to follow Yahoo's policy regarding browser support.

Communications & Public Affairs are using the open source php for their database delivered web services but they are looking closely at "Ruby on Rails" which is growing in popularity.

WebOps Meeting May 30, 2006

  1. Minutes of meeting May 17, 2006

    Accepted with minor changes.
  2. Business Arising

    #2-4 MediaWiki is now being backed up.

    #4 The Sharepoint software currently supported by IST, apparently, will continue to be supported in the future.

    #6 Marina has set up a UWOnly directory for testing UWOnly access to these PDF files.

  3. Agenda review

    Add #6. Membership

  4. Vacation Schedule

    Marina will be off starting next week for 3 weeks. Christy will look after any comments received from users and Charles will look after any proxy problems.  Bill will call the next WebOps meeting.

    ACTION: Esther will setup a web page for holidays and everyone can use Contribute to enter their holidays.
  5. More on CLF, Web 2.0

    Marina has talked with Susan so that our sponsors are aware of our activities. Any significant direction will have to wait for the new Associate University Librarian, Information Technology Services.

    Christy and Marina have added more to the wiki site. Rachael has a blog for current news and a meeting is scheduled with the Library Executive. She will report about the blog, RSS feed, Podcasting and other Web 2.0 areas that are being investigated.

    ACTION: Rachael will report on the results of her meeting with the Library Executive.

    A Powerpoint presentation, The Librarian's Emerging Technologies Survival Guide 2006 by Geoff Harder and Kenton Good from the University of Alberta Libraries is worth examination.  It is available at http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/staff/isrtrain/private/
    EI_survivalguide.ppt    .

    A blog project for liaison Librarians was discussed as a way to open communication using tools with which our students are familiar.

    ACTION: Marina and Christy will work out the details of a potential program that could be presented to the librarians.

  6. Membership

    Christy will be leaving WebOps although she will remain in the LibWebReview Group. Marina has talked to Susan.

    ACTION:Marina will send an email invitation to ISR members for a volunteer replacement. 

    Later WebOps will revisit the membership issue in more detail and see about possible representatives from Circulation Services and perhaps even a second representative from ISR.
  7. Around the Table

    Charles reminded everyone that starting June 17th all local calls will require the 519 area code to connect.  This will mean adjusting speed calls or other coded local phone numbers. Systems will be issuing a reminder.

    Charles noted that the use of 5 digit extension will be implemented on August 8th.

    Chris briefly reported on his work with XML and the Scholarly Societies Project with Jim Parrott. Browsers are still not ready for direct CSS display of XML documents. Server side conversion is still required and Apache is developing a module for server side conversions. In the future an automatic server side pdf conversion could provide the display format for XML documents. Chris plans in the future to present a session describing the activities arising from this project.  In the mean time if any one is interested there are some good articles at O'Reilly's xml.com.

    Bill mentioned Tom Bray's keynote speech at OUCC that described the potential of blogs as sources of expertise. Tim said that professors at Universities, as sources of expertise, should be using blogs to share their authoritative expertise with other Internet users.  There will be a Friday morning IST session on the OUCC conference this week.
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June 22, 2006