Web Advisory Group Home > Minutes > 25 February 2002

Minutes - 25 February 2002

Present: Duke (minutes), Hennig, Skuce

1. Finding articles guide

Tracy Gabridge met briefly with the group to discuss the Instruction Committee's work on creating a "finding articles" guide and how that would fit into a larger "how to find materials on your topic" set of pages they are working on.

2. Meeting with erescat group

On February 15th Nicole and Darcy met with the erescat group to discuss the problem that most e-journals are not accessible from off-campus from the Barton catalog. The proxy string that allows off-campus access has not historically been added to the beginning of the URL in Barton, so off-campus MIT users who find a journal record in Barton with a URL would not be able to access the journal, even if they have MIT web certificates. Furthermore, users get no guidance (from the record or the denial message they get when they click on the URL) of how to go about getting to the journal from off-campus (they should use Vera).

The group discussed possible solutions and weighed the pros and cons of each. Jennifer Edwards will look into the possiblility of adding a note to the journal records redirecting users to Vera for off-campus access. It is also hoped that the implementation of SFX in Barton may provide a solution to this problem.

3. Review of Archives homepage

The group conducted a heuristic review of the Archives homepage http://libraries.mit.edu/archives using Jakob Nielsen's guidelines in his "Homepage Usability" book. The homepage scored well, and the review provided a few minor suggestions for improvements.

4. Vera downtime

Vera is down for ~20 minutes every night around 3:15 am for backup. We recently received a complaint from a student who likes to do his work at that hour and was inconvenienced by the downtime. The group decided that was still probably the best time to be down, and once the student was informed of the brief time it would be down each night he was satisfied. One of the problems is that we haven't found a way to automatically redirect users to the "downtime" page while Vera is down. Also, this comment made us realize that Barton and Vera are both simultaneously down at this time. Christine is working on reducing the time Barton is down for backup every night - once this is accomplished, hopefully we can stage the downtimes so that they do not overlap.

 

Next meeting:

Wednesday, March 6, 2-3:30pm; 10-500 (Nicole's office)

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Web Advisory Group Home > Minutes > 25 February 2002