Web Advisory Group Home > Minutes > 6 April 2005

Minutes - 6 April 2005

Members present: Hennig (minutes), Duke, Gaskell, Quirion, Skuce

1. Scholarly Communication Web site

http://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly

We discussed where to link to this permanently in addition to Hot Topics. It is sometimes featured on the home page, but needs more places to easily find it from.

Here's where we decided to add links:
- More quick links (home page)
- we'll suggest that each individual library add a link on their home page
- we'll email the Faculty user group to ask them to add a question about it to our Faculty FAQ
- we'll make a shortcut URL for it (http://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly )

We also discussed the larger issue of things that currently listed in "hot topics." We'll continue this discussion at a future meeting.

2. Photo stripe ideas and home page news

- More ideas have been coming in, Darcy will work on them.
- Darcy will make a "feature" page to publicize Metadata Services Unit when we feature it.

3. Business FAQ from Penn - possibly project for Dewey's web site

- Millicent reported that Dewey is continuing to discuss this project. They found out more about the back end and how it can be customized. Librarians who make the entries would still have to be able to code HTML. Some good things about it are the stats that it keeps on which questions are being looked at and what searches people are entering. It also tracks new questions that other libraries add to the FAQ. The best thing about it is being able to use or modify the content that other libraries have already written about how to use business databases.

Dewey will continue to discuss whether to purchase this tool.

4. Draft pages for RedLight Green, WorldCat and similar tools

- Stephen will continue to work on this and send to Nicole for mocking up.
- Stephen will coordinate with Sarah Wenzel, who has agreed to make a page about WorldCat in this context.
- The plan is to have a group of pages about other tools/interfaces that can be used to search our content, such as these.

5. Brief updates:

- A new form is under construction for Designated (added) Borrowers.
- Lisa Sweeney is working on a new design for the GIS web site and will be meeting with Nicole soon.
- The donor web pages are going to be totally revamped and expanded for the next academic year. (Sharon, Jos, Heather, met with Nicole). Work will begin in a few weeks. (after Visiting Committee)

6. RSS feeds:

Nicole updated the group on new ideas about RSS feeds and how we could use them.

- MIT Web Communication Services is working on a "feed converter" for web authors that enables the displaying of feeds from other web sites in your own page. Nicole is experimenting with this.
We could envision using this on subject pages, news pages, and more. We also envision other sites at MIT displaying our content in their pages (when we get our RSS feeds up and running).

- We looked at examples of "portal" like pages that include feeds from other sites: My Yahoo allows this, Yahoo groups (email lists) can be read as RSS feeds, and services like Flickr and del.icio.us include RSS feeds.

- More on this at future meetings.

Next meeting:

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

- Tracy will bring more Barton OPAC design questions to the group.
- Lois may be ready to bring the new Records Management web site for review.

Web Advisory Group Home > Minutes > 6 April 2005