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Web Operational Management Group

Minutes of the Meeting of September 21st, 2007
2:00 - 4:00 pm, Davis Center LIB 428

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

Regrets: none

  1. Approval of WebOps Minutes of August 8, 2007
    Accepted as amended.

  2. Business Arising
    1. # 2.1 Charles spoke with CSAG about other groups' training modules; no-one is doing.
    2. # 5 Group study room booking system is about to go live - Where should the link be? After discussion, it was decided the link should be in the right-hand navbar under "Your Account".
    3. # 5 The database-driven government publications service is now live.
    4. Allan has attended a meeting of the Web Advisory Committee; minutes will be distributed soon. He noted that the clf rules will be strongest for navigation, headers, footers and branding.


  3. Agenda review
    No changes.

  4. Quick Polls

    We are almost out of Quick Poll questions. Action: Tim will canvass Porter ISR, Dan will canvass Davis ISR, and Allan will canvass department heads, all for possible questions (with accompanying "Did you know?"). Some questions will be recycled to see how different groups respond and to remind users of features.

  5. Google Analytics

    Dan has been using GA to track effect of the QuickPolls; many more profiles are available and Chris has been developing other profiles and filters.

    There is a need to determine which profiles should be kept or discarded, eg., the Scholarly Societies pages and the Waterloo Wellington Dufferin Health Libraries pages do not yet have GA scripts. It was agreed they should be added.

    The Java script has been moved from the bottom of pages to the top. This has affected anti-spam measures for forms; Bill reports that this has been successfully fixed.

    Promotional Issues: It was decided that the best way to promote GA would be to include GA reports wherever useful. It will catch the interest of others who could use it and they will request training. This was thought to be more effective than a couple of all-inclusive training sessions.


  6. Google Indexing of Library webpages

    It has been noted that some items are not appearing as expected in GA. This is apparently due to some pages being identified as www.lib.uwaterloo.ca and others library.uwaterloo.ca. Action: Bill will look into reconfiguring the Apache server to send all requests to www.lib.uwaterloo.ca. Search engine optimization is a topic to be looked into in the future.

  7. Forms & Spam

    In response to the recent spate of spam on comment forms Bill and Chris have been moving forms to Cold Fusion. The initial effort should reduce much of the spam; requiring responses to human readable queries should reduce it further.

  8. Surveying Students

    LibWebReview report that they have received approval from the Ethics Committee to survey users of our website for 4 years. A couple of rounds of surveys have been done so far though results have yet to be posted. It was agreed that we should continue for the remainder of the 4 years. Changes to questions must be approved by the Ethics Committee.

  9. Skill Set - Books of Interest
    Allan noted a couple of books he had found useful Don't make me think! : a common sense approach to Web usability
    by Steve Krug
    The elements of user design for the web
    by Garrett

    Chris noted that he had found useful:
    Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS (2nd Edition)
    by Dan Cederholm
    (There's a copy in TRELLIS)

  10. Around the Table

    Allan has invited Nancy Collins to join WebOps.

    Allan has met with Charles, Don Hamilton and Greg Sennema re: TUG initiatives

    Let Allan of any courses you are interested in taking. Charles opined that CSS would be a good start; he and Chris will investigate potential courses.

    Dan noted that there appear to be no links to information about Google widgets and Lib X on our pages.

    Allan described a group of students doing a project on widgets and Meebo who may be contacting members.

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October 22, 2007