Minutes of the Meeting of May 9,2012
Dana Porter Library, LIB 428
Present: Annie Belanger, Nancy Collins, Doug Morton, Rachel McNeil (guest recorder), Marian Davies, Graham Faulkner, Chris Gray, Stever Weber, Alex McCulloch
Absent: Charles Woods, Esther Millar, Pascal Calarco
Note: This meeting is a special meeting to discuss the Web Governance and Development Framework for uWaterloo Library Public Website, and the uWaterloo Library—Web Redesign Project Charter documents. For this reason, approval of the meeting minutes and business arising did not take place.
- Web Governance and Development Framework for uWaterloo Library Public Website
- Document based on discussions from past 1 ½ years as well as best practices widely known and accepted, including a review of frameworks from other universities
- Mission for website aligns with pillars for library review
- Chris: we should treat website as a library branch because for many of our users it’s the place they most frequent the library
- Action: Annie read to more mission statements to see how the language here compares to other universities
- Page 2: Web Governance
- Does the content in this section accurately reflect the idea of “governance”?
- Add a comment about how uWaterloo’s overall web management guides and informs our work
- What are user needs vs. our opinions of user needs? Important to stay consistent
- Action: Annie to edit layout and clarify governance vs management
- Page 2: Website Management
- Chart to explain how WebOps guides and informs web presence
- Make committee more into an official team
- Full WebOps Terms of Reference to be a separate document that might outline all qualities members need to be a part of the group, or suggest that we add other special positions
- Page 3: Content Developers
- Oddity that content developers don’t receive content training or do not have competencies requirements when they do at our service points. Group discussed the benefits of this
- Page 4: Web Design and Development Standards
- Charles commented before the meeting that the general “motherhood” statements should be explained in greater detail, which they now are in the sub-bullets
- These standards are ideals, but the document still needs work so the language better reflects WebOps’ goals. Use “required” when it’s necessary, but “should” when it’s an ideal that will take time
- Page 5: Functionality
- Edit number 4 to reflect use of smaller/hand-held devices
- Edit number 7 to allow for embedded social media
- Page 5: Compliance
- Use WCAG 1.0 instead of 2.0 because it is more feasible
- Overall, committee agrees with principles and further edits to the document will be done by email
- uWaterloo Library—Web Redesign Project Charter
- The Framework was develop prior to the charter because it helps us decide where we’re going and what we want before we design the project
- Ideas discussed at last WebOps meeting:
- Phase 1: Static + forms
- Lib.uwaterloo.ca domain
- Redesign About, Services, etc. to Drupal
- But not: LibGuides, Testtube, SFX
- Phase 2: Sub-sites
- Create sub-sites for Musagetes + Architecture, and Special Collections, if needed
- Phase 3: Migration of Advanced Functionality, as feasible
- Migration needs to be planned effectively to avoid content blunders
- Library must decide to what extent their functionality requirements will be met with Central WCMS. The integration trends were discussed:
- Using only Central WCMS – about 2% (colleges) to with this option, and those usually do so because they don’t have the manpower to make big alterations
- Central CMS + Library modules – about 8%: this is the middle ground/compromise
- Library install – about 90% take this route
- Chris: Drupal has a “skin” that is 100% mobile accessible out-of-the-box, but that’s not the option the university chose
- WebOps wants to rebuild the website from ground up, with preparation for migration to Drupal in mind
- Language in Charter is sometimes negative (1.2, second paragraph), but it reflects the reality so WebOps will keep it in the document
- Document isn’t a project plan, so it should not be too detailed
- Page 1 – 1.3
- Take out the section stating our alignment with WCMS until the decision is made about what approach to take
- Page 2 – 1.4
- Add researchers from paragraph so it aligns with 3 points below
- Marian: do we need to make distinction between on-campus and off-campus users? It was decided this should be an underlying theme, not an audience
- Page 2 – 2
- Regardless of the WCMS decision, WebOps plans to follow the university’s web design practices
- Take out second last point
- Page 3 – 2.1
- Doug: we forgot to add the launch of the website on our list
- Write list like patent, so it reflects the goal first eg. “creation of new library website in a WCMS” at the top of the list, and “launch website” as point #7
- The idea of finding pages that haven’t been used in the past two years as potentially for removal was agreed to
- Point #3 – develop personas to assist with testing
- Difference between on-campus and off-campus users may come out here
- Flip points 5 and 6
- Purpose of Timeline (page 4) is to help understand the complexity of the plan: it reflects high-level milestones
- 14-month deadline reflects a September 2013 launch, but a January 2014 launch may be more realistic in order to work out the kinks and present a truly high-quality website
- Need to launch site 1 month before the semester begins at least to library staff so that librarians have time to edit their instruction materials
- Hiring new staff for the project will also increase timeline
- Want staff buy-in and most importantly time commitment
- Librarians need to be trained because they are the largest content developers
- Alex: make this as big a deal as the Library Review
- Annie: hire professional writer to write first draft of content, which will help ensure consistency in content without redundancy
- Help avoid the “vacation crunch” we hit in the summer
- Page 5 – 3.4
- Success Criteria is successful if we launch: process and end product are both important
- Pascal is the WebOps sponsor, Susan is also important because of content – they will co-sponsor, but the Project Manager is T.B.D.
- We will likely need two project managers for two prorjects: Redesign and WCMS
- Redesign entails IA, needs, content design
- WCMS entails infrastructure, taxonomy, structure, content, theming, workflow
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June 4, 2012
