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Web Operational Management Group

Minutes of the Meeting of August 22nd, 2007
2:00 - 4:00 pm, Davis Center LIB 428
DRAFT

Present: Allan Bell (Chair), Marian Davies , Tim Ireland, Bill Oldfield (recorder), Dan Sich, Chris Gray, Esther Millar, Charles Woods.

Regrets: Doug Morton

  1. Approval of WebOps Minutes of August 8, 2007
    The list of "WebOps Skill Sets" had general and advanced training requirements. The minutes will be adjusted to reflect this organization. ACTION: Allan will send the breakdown to Marian. The minutes were approved with the above change.

  2. Business Arising
    1. # 4 WebOps Skill Set - ACTION: Allan will check with IST about possible SEW course that might meet our needs.
      ACTION:Charles will follow up with CSAG about other department's training modules.
    2. # 6 TRELLIS Tool bar - The TRELLIS tool bar and the extra pages will be put on hold. There will be a TUG wide meeting Oct. 1st about all the initiatives underway, some that may dramatically impact on TRELLIS, for the 07/08 year.
    3. # 5 Quick Polls - No impact upon the use of the Chat services was noted from the adline in the Quick Poll. ACTION: Charles will check GA for July 19-23 to see if there was any increase in use of the AskLib page.


  3. Agenda review
    None.

  4. RACER and Wish's request to plant Racer link on right-nav bar

    There was a discussion of the request and it was made clear that WebOps should have policy guidelines in place that could be consulted in response to this type of request. This will be a goal of our website review process.

    The best workflow seems to be for people to search TRELLIS first before going to RACER. The problem is that, although there is a link from a TRELLIS search it is very inconvenient for the user who has to copy all the information a second time. Currently Ryerson is working with Scholarsportal for a means of carrying info from SFX through to RACER.

    ACTION:Allan will respond to Wish telling him that a site review is on the agenda where this and other questions will be addressed. Library staff will be consulted in the process. In addition, WebOps would like to know if ILL has any statistics on the number of ILL requests made for items owned by UW.

    The RACER page is not showning up on a Google site search. It appears that some pages are being missed. The "robot.txt" could be a source of the problem. ACTION: Chris will try to see if he can discover why the search is not working as expected.

  5. Student Booking System (SBS)

    A student hired by the Library has setup a Student Booking System similar to the Laurier system and based upon the open source MRBS software. The system is ready to go and will be the first production service running on a Blade Server under VMWare. The url for the system is bookings.lib.uwaterloo.ca/sbs/. The system automatically switches http requests to https because to book a room a student must authenticate via UWDir. A valid certificate is being acquired for the service.

    An out of the box instance of MRBS with the Waterloo look and feel was also installed for possible use for a conference room booking system to replace the current manual system. This system can be accessed at bookings.lib.uwaterloo.ca/mbs/. Only Library staff can logon to book the conference rooms.

    Sharon and Mary will be developing a Current News item. The plans for implementation and linking are:

    • A Current News Item
    • An advertisement line in a Quick Poll
    • An SBS link in the right navigation bar of the homepage
    • An SBS link from the Services page


  6. Government Publications

    Bill gave a heads up on the new database driven government publication services for UW and WLU that will go live this September. The development version of the Waterloo public interface can be accessed at http://train2.lib.uwaterloo.ca/govpubs2/public/waterloo/index1.cfm

  7. WebOps Agenda

    This year will be busy for WebOps and have a dramatic impact on our web services. The allocation of limited staff resources to all these activities will be a challenge. The primary projects are:

    1. ERM replacement - Verde (Charles)
    2. Voyager Upgrade - (Don Hamilton)
    3. Primo - (TUG OPAC Group)
    4. Website Review (WebOps)

    The current schedule for these activities is:

    • ERM to Verde - starting now until implementation in December
    • Voyager Upgrade - December
    • Primo - 15 weeks after the Voyager Upgrade

    A review is also under way of some technical services workflows (i.e.acquisitions/cataloguing) which may impact on resources.

    Vanderbilt has partnered with ExLibris and has a beta site for Primo. The beta version is up and available. ACTION: Charles will forward the URL to the group.

  8. WebOps Training

    ACTION: Allan will check with IST about possible SEW course that might meet our needs.
    Charles will follow up with CSAG about other department's training modules.

  9. Google Analytics (GA)

    Chris discussed some things that we have learned about how GA works. Some of our assumption were incorrect.

    UWSpace is now working. The javascript, which had to be downloaded into UWSpace to prevent IEs warning popups, had changed and now it is downloaded nightly .

    A number of tasks remain to be performed before GA is fully operational:

    1. The GA tracking code is missing from a large number of pages on the site. These pages need to be identified and tracking code added where necessary.
    2. The tracking code needs to be updated on all pages to indicate separate servers are still a part of the one library web service.
    3. The profiles and the names of profiles need to be finalized.
    4. Verification that the data collected is reasonably accurate is needed for trust.
    5. Training will be required for Library staff so they can access GA and find the information they require.


  10. CSS Conversion

    The conversion was complete without a hitch for both the static and dynamic pages of the website.

    Esther also added a red text style which had been requested by staff. A linkbot run will be performed in September

  11. Around the Table

    Marian commented on the email from Ann Fullerton regarding SBS. ACTION: Allan will respond.

    Tim gave a heads up that the LINC online booking for courses is working.

    Charles noted the age of our primary library server (library.uwaterlo.ca) and the need for replacement. Another Sun box seems an appropriate direction.

    Dan noted that he has signed up for Access 2007. Allan, Bill and Chris are also interested in attending.

    Esther noted that Bill will look after Current News next week in her absence.

    Allan mentioned the new University Web Advisory Committee had it first meeting. Jesse Rodgers was there but he may not be attending regularly. CMS was mentioned as was the need for more research into the audience and the need to make the CLF more nimble. It was suggested that perhaps IST should offer a complete web site maintenance service for some of the smaller units that do not have the staff yet have a need for a web presence.

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June 23, 2010