Web Advisory Group Home > Minutes > 17 March 2004

Minutes - 17 March 2004

Present: Hennig (chair), Duke, Edelman (minutes), Quirion, Skuce

1. New home page design

The group discussed how to present the schematic design to Steering Committee. Nicole and Stephen will report back to the rest of the group after the meeting tomorrow.

2. VERA tweaks

A. A suggestion was made to add a way to see the database descriptions other than only in the Subject view. Since the keyword results template mixes databases and e-journals into one template, it wouldn't be practical to just add the description row, since e-journals don't have descriptions.

We discussed another possible solution: add a link in the coverage column called "description", which would link to a longer record for the database, including the description. The link would only show if there is a description. (so it wouldn't show for e-journals)

This link would show in a keyword search but not in other searches where the description shows automatically, such as subjects. We could add the visible description also to the results screens for new titles and title browse searches.

We like this idea and Nicole will bring the discussion to VOLT.

B. Another suggestion was to make the A-Z browse screen more fine tuned with the letters of the alphabet broken up further, since there are so many titles in Vera now. This is very time consuming to implement because it involves clicking on each letter (or sets of letters) and looking at how many results there are and deciding where in the alphabet to break it and how many to show per screen for each link.

So another solution was proposed to make the browse lists more workable. We could change the results screen to show only title and coverage dates, in a small font size, and in a list view rather than a table. That way we could fit many more titles per screen without slowing down the time it takes to load each screen.

Nicole will mock up this idea so we can see how it would look. She will bring this idea to VOLT as well.

C. We discussed the idea (forwarded from NERD) of putting warning buttons on records imported from Serials Solutions, because we can't control the quality of the information in them. We decided that some sort of alert, such as a note or a different text color, would be useful in staff Vera but not in the public view. We also discussed how to remind people that staff vera exists. Nicole will get back to Ellen about this.

Next meetings:

Wednesday, April 7, 2-3:30, Barker Conference Room
Wednesday, April 14 (instead of April 21)

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