Web Advisory Group Home > Minutes > 19 October 2005
Minutes - 19 October 2005Members present: Hennig (chair), Duke, Skuce, Quirion (minutes)
Guests: Gabridge, Wenger1. News blog and embedding RSS feeds in library home page
Nicole and Darcy are trying to encourage more bloggers within local units to post stories on the news blog. Nicole and Darcy are each trying to post at least one story per week, but it hasn't always been possible. It would be nice to have at least one story per day, or a few per week. There are many people subscribed to the blog RSS feed, more than there are hits on the blog pages. Nicole went to a talk at LITA and the speaker from Berkeley mentioned that blogs aren't a publication, but a method of communication.
The group discussed other things that could be blogs. The scholarly communications web site and open access movement are possibilities, and the content is very cutting edge and newsworthy. It might be good to find faculty partners to blog on this topic? Library culture is used to perfecting everything and running words by many people, so using blogs as a tool to post content quickly could be difficult. There may be a way to put new scholarly communication items into the blog, embed the new items into the scholarly communication page via feed, and link to the blog from the scholarly communication page. Stephen will talk to Carol about blog links related to scholarly
communication, and ask Heather to enter any new scholarly communication news from Carol into the MIT Libraries News blog. Stephen will write a paragraph about the scholarly communication site for the blog to get the new scholarly communication blog category started. Nicole will post that in the blog, and create the new category in the blog. Nicole will make a draft of a new scholarly communication home page, with an embedded feed from the blog so that new content in the blog appears on the scholarly communication page too.Nicole will also make a category for digital library research on the blog. DSpace news is being entered in a wiki, and Nicole experimented with embedding the feed from the Wiki into MIT's DSpace site news. Nicole will put in a sample story, and make MacKenzie an editor on the news blog, to facilitate republishing of DSpace news, and add more new and interesting stories to the blog.
Barker's test home page http://libraries.mit.edu/barker/index2.html has spotlight items that are populated by the engineering feed on the news blog. Kate McNeill-Harman from Dewey has also been trained in adding feeds to the Dewey home page. Nicole will control the number of stories in the feeds appearing on home page through the settings in Feed Digest. Nicole will soon train the other web contacts to add content from the blog RSS feed into other divisional/branch library home pages.
2. SFX Topics
SFX and OpenURL to create persistent links--We looked at the test version, Rich will make some changes to get the style sheet working, and change the SFX menu to say "create a persistent link" to this item. The "Citation Export" heading will be changed Citation Services, since export functions from RefWorks/EndNote don't work yet. Rich will let us know when the changes are made, and then Darcy will make the new http://libraries.mit.edu/help/linking.html live after the linking function is live, and add a link from the E-Reserves page. There will also be a blog story.
Barton as an SFX Source--There was a meeting in September about making Barton an SFX source. The notes from this meeting were reviewed. Rich is going to check with Beth about the OpenURL ISSN Script. Final decisions about the SFX button will come back to WAG + SFX when the other steps are place. At the next WAG meeting, or the meeting after in November, Rich and Darcy will report back on their progress. After Rich finishes his work on Barton/SFX, we will eventually come back to the fix for IEEE conference proceedings which Notre Dame developed. This fix was developed in SFX version 2, but doesn't yet work with version 3.
We don't know if users are using the Full Text Finder ,and haven't heard much from staff or patrons. We don't know if we can get statistics via SFX or from the Owens web server, Rich will look into this or ask on the SFX list to find out.
The topic of counting access to e-resources through SFX was discussed. Tracy reported that subject selectors just finished a review of our Springer/Kluwer titles and it would have been helpful to have more representative data of use if we could include SFX hits in addition to the hits through VERA. The group discussed various approaches for bringing the topic up for discussion in a broader forum. We agreed that some more knowledge about the extent of statistics and reports within SFX and the amount of work necessary to insert the emetrics string into the SFX URL should be assessed before taking the discussion to groups beyond WAG. Nicole and Tracy will send message to Carol in order to get her initial input.
3. Other RSS items
The virtual reference collection isn't being updated right now. Nicole has experimented with using Feed Digest and a Del.icio.us Account to make the editing of this page more automated. Nicole book marked some of our virtual reference pages in Del.icio.us, and assigned tags based on category names to Del.icio.us. Since it's RSS-enabled, users could subscribe to it when new resources are added, and use Del.icio.us to update, without having to update the web page. This would also facilitate multiple authors, without HTML. Nicole will ask Marion on to add the old links to the Del.icio.us account, and Nicole will train Georgiana and anyone else who will be working on this page. We can add a link back to Del.icio.us for users to see the delicious interface, and also allow users to subscribe to the RSS feed.
Nicole my also do a training for staff on RSS as she did earlier this year, and maybe RSS part 2 to include social book marking systems.
4. Photo stripe and news ideas
Chris Papadopulos in Rotch had some ideas on some historical photos of Rotch, and there may be a GIS spotlight coming up which is waiting for images. Christine has been trained in photo stripes, but hasn't had a project to work on yet. Christine can work on the linear feet of books, and follow up with Darcy or Marion.
5. Primo
Primo is a new tool that Ex Libris is developing as a front end to many different types of local collections, like the catalog, DSpace, etc. MIT staff saw a preview of Primo earlier today. Darcy and Nicole were at the preview and reported that there will be lots of good features, users can make recommendations, and a lot of user interface work has been done. There may be ways to bring RSS into it. It was a simple interface that showed images of book jackets and other Amazon or Google like features. Users can leave reviews of books, and the system shows recommendations such as "people who looked at this item also searched X database, borrowed X book, and viewed X image". Options such as "view all items by this author, other items by this subject" are also possible. There are also faceted browse options, and features we've seen in Red Light Green. It's a prototype, with release expected in Q3 2006. It's based in web services, and allows new services to be integrated into the services at a later time. Since it's modular, the search box could be copied into Stellar pages, or other places on the web.
Nicole also mentioned that the University of Rochester also had really good usability work and wording on menus/search boxes. Nicole also had an idea to do a training on new trends in searching, such as faceted browsing and FRBR so that staff have an awareness of them.
6. Staff Web
Nina is running the guidelines by Steering Committee. Nicole needs to make some changes, and we'll be charged with updating the staff web home page this year.
7. News
A group has been formed to discuss podcasting at MIT. The group has a mandate to create a directory of podcasts at MIT, and Nicole referred them to the metadata services group. Nicole will meet with Theresa to talk about podcasting authors @ MIT events. Perhaps MIT World could create the audio files, and Nicole could create a feed for this.
Nicole & Darcy talked about putting a more prominent link to the blog on our home page, as well as link to our news feed on the home page.
The MIT Libraries web site was included as a good example in this book about user interface design: Understanding your users: a practical guide to user requirements, by Catherine Courage and Kathy Baxter. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1558609350/ The book contains new usability methods such as focused interviews, that it would be good for WAG members to learn and use in the next semester. This book is being used by members of the SFX-Verde group to plan some of their work.
Next meeting:
Wednesday, November 2, 2-3:30 pm, Cubespace
http://libstaff.mit.edu/webgroup/minutes/20051019.html
Web Advisory Group Home > Minutes > 19 October 2005