User Interface Group
January 25, 2007
User Interface Group
January 25, 2007Present: Darcy Duke, Lisa Harrington, Nicole Hennig (minutes), Lisa Horowitz, Bonnie Parks
1. Updates
We've had some favorible publicity for some of our projects. Bonnie told the group about Lorcan Dempsey's mention of our LibX pages at an ALA session. Darcy told us about the popularity of Rich's work on the RSS feeds from Barton, he's getting lots of requests from other libraries for his code. And we got positive feedback from the student evaluations of Nicole and Darcy's IAP class: Library toolbars, extensions and web apps: little tools with big impact.
Nicole showed the group how to use Technorati to find mentions of "MIT Libraries" in blogs. She has saved the search "mit libraries" as an RSS feed as an easy way to track what people are saying about us.
2. Staff web move
Nicole reported that the move is mostly done, but there are some things still being worked on:
- Marion is working on updating links to forms that are now protected with certificates.
- Alex is going to make a global redirect from "macfadden" URLs to a page that tells people the server has moved and gives them a search box to find the page.
- Alex is going to compress all the old pages and store them offline, so Google will no longer index them.
- We're aiming for June 30 to retire the macfadden machine and IP address entirely.
3. Barton as an SFX source
A. Nicole reported on a meeting with Rich and Beth met to coordinate moving forward with this project.
At that meeting we had to rethink how we were planning to deal with URLs in Barton that are NOT in the SFX Knowledgebase (such as gov docs, databases and other misc things). Rich will look into ways to either put them in the KB or pass them through so they can appear on the SFX menu.
We agreed on a staged approach (in order to not delay this project any longer).
Stage one: (as soon as possible)
1. Show SFX button on brief and full display if the title is in SFX, don't show it if it's not.
2. Keep the URLs showing (we were planning on hiding them, but since lots of things are not in SFX yet, we need to still show them).Stage two: (later this semester)
1. Find a way to deal with all the titles that have URLs but are not in the SFX Knowledgebase (see above).
2. After that is solved, then hide the other URLs and use the SFX button as the only way to get to e-items.
B. How to publicize this to staff:We agreed to publicize this by:
1. a message to all-lib a couple of days before we turn it on
2. a brownbag lunch session for staff all about SFX, including Barton as an SFX source (soon after we turn it on, hopefully late February)
4. Bypassing the SFX menu
At our last meeting we agreed that we want to bypass the SFX menu when there is only one full text source available. Usability results from other institutions show that users prefer to bypass the menu and go directly to full text where possible.
Here is how it will work :
- go directly to the target if there is only 1 full text choice.
- populate the SFX menu with only the target choices if there is more than one full text choice.
- display the complete SFX menu when there are no full text choices (because that's when you need the other links).We agreed that we want to do this, but we still need a way to use the "permanent link" feature of the SFX menu in some cases. So we agreed to ask Rich to activate this from everywhere EXCEPT the FullText Finder. That's the place we are advising people to use to set up permanent links to a menu for particular articles from other web pages. See: Linking to articles online).
Nicole will email all-lib about this change once it's ready to go.
5. XC meeting update
Nicole and William will be attending a 2 day meeting at the Univ. of Rochester about their eXtensible Catalog (XC) project.
The University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries is studying how best to develop an open-source online system that can unify access to traditional and digital library resources. With a $283,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University will begin planning and requirements analysis activities for a new system known as eXtensible Catalog (XC).
Part of the preparation for that involves completing a survey of desired features of a new kind of catalog. Since we've already done a prioritization exercise that involves many of the items, Nicole will use the results of that to match with their list and then email the group for comments.
6. Betas, browser extensions and toolbars
Nicole created this new page:
Browser Extensions and Toolbars for Library ResearchIt's a place to list future such tools on our web site and is linked from "Help Yourself." Nicole will write a story about it in the blog. She has funds to hire a student work this semester to assist with finding and testing possible relevant Firefox extensions and customizing them to work with our search tools.
In our IAP class: Library toolbars, extensions and web apps: little tools with big impact, we gave a very brief demo of Zotero as a free tool for managing your scholarly citations (similar to RefWorks and Endnote, but works inside your Firefox browser). There is a lot of interest in tools of this type, which is something we also saw in last spring's User Needs Study.
We plan to offer more classes for students and our own staff on personal information management tools such as these. Nicole will also repeat the IAP class for our own staff.
7. RSSDarcy will be teaching IAP classes on RSS next week. Since Ulrich's is now keeping track of RSS feeds for journals, Darcy will add a note about that to our page that lists RSS feeds for some of our journal packages.
Ulrich's shows the feeds on the full display for a journal in a field called "RSS Availability." Ellen will be inquiring with Ulrich's about whether they could make an export available of all the journals with feeds and their feed links). We aren't sure if there are any plans for this kind of information to be made available in the SFX Knowledgebase, but it seems like it would make sense for ExLibris to provide this as a service.
A few months ago there was an email discussion initiated by Anna Gold about adding RSS feeds to Vera, which turned into a discussion about putting them in SFX instead. We experimented with it a bit and there is still a sample link in our SFX menu for the journal Nature to its RSS feed (look up Nature in the FullText Finder to see it). This would be a lot of work for us to maintain if we were to starting putting all those feed links in the SFX KB, so we're glad that Ulrich's is maintaining listings of RSS feeds. For now we can direct people there to look up feeds for their favorite journals.
8. Prioitizing non-Barton items
Nicole updated the groups about a few of the items on the list of ideas. The list needs to be updated, so we decided to save this one for next time.
9. Full text linking from Proquest
Lisa Horowitz talked to Proquest about their full text linking. Since there seemed to be no added value to users beyond what SFX already does, we decided not to turn on that linking, but to continue with the SFX links only.
Next Meeting:
22 February 2007, 10:30-12 noon, CubeSpace
(No meeting on Feb. 8 - Nicole will be away)