|
I-Share OPAC Team Minutes
May 17, 2007 Meeting (Conference Call)
Present: Hilary Kraus, Paige Weston, Cason Snow, Nancy Bohm, Amanda Pippitt, Steve Wright, Kathy Chang, Tom Goetz, Jan Sung, Jon Gorman, Skip Burhans
The meeting was convened at 2:05 p.m.
The minutes of the April 17, 2007 meeting were approved.
Report from End-User Conference - Paige Weston
- Ex Libris is committed to supporting Voyager. They have increased the number of developers and created two teams to work on it. They will keep both Voyager and ALEPH for “many years”. New releases for Voyager are planned through 2009. Although they do intend to emphasize the Primo front end product it will not replace WebVoyage which will get a “facelift”. A Voyager release 7.0 is due out in mid 2008 and 8.0 sometime in early 2009. No significant changes to the Universal Borrowing module have been announced. Since WebVoyage control mechanisms will continue to be implemented via config files, Paige advises the committee to proceed with the recommendation to add CSS controls.
- Texas A&M findings: 45% of TALL searches return a null set. Possible reasons: an initial article was used, spelling errors, the default search was used. Less than 10% of all searches were limited in any way. (Parenthetical comment: they were probably all by librarians.) Their Quick Search page is considered to be elegant.
- Report from University of Rochester: they have developed a user interface that has some very nice design elements but can be considered too much of a destination, although it could be used other places as well.
- Report from Jan on spellchecking presentation: Spell checking is a high priority problem that needs to be solved. Google spell check is not available. Two questions that have arisen: what pages to apply the feature to and what the feature will check against?
Misc items before proceeding
- Thanks to all for the input from the last meeting.
- Direct comments on tutorials to Courtney Green.
Role of the Committee in creating the look and feel of the catalog
- We need good feedback and to be kept in the loop.
Branding in the catalog
- Branding needs improvement. Some issues are: image size? text? arrows? icons? [I have a big “NO!” written right after this.] One comment received from a student noted that the I-Share logo links back to itself. The committee decided no immediate changes are necessary.
Voyager Upgrade
- Version 6.2 has been released but it not nearly as big an upgrade as was done last summer. There are no significant OPAC bug fixes included. Paige hopes to have a CSS editor tool “sooner rather than later” so that stored profiles can be easily reapplied after the upgrade. Few OPAC Team-generated enhancements are waiting to be rolled out, but one is the corrected hyperlink on 610 fields.
Spellchecking tool
- The subcommittee thanked everyone for their input.
- The proposal needs to be edited and Jon will review it next week.
New search types
- No one has heard any responses to the queries sent to the lists.
- Whatever happens, usability testing should be done on it.
CSS-ifying WebVoyage
- Endeavor is interested in our ideas and may send developers to the accessible design workshop. At least they asked for a follow-up meeting.
- All in all they have been more responsive than was expected.
Google Maps mash-up
- No progress has been made on this, but it’s on the list of things to do.
“Go Get It?” Button
- Could also called, “Where Are Copies?”.
- How much effort would be involved in doing it and would it be worthwhile?
Usability
- 3 IUG Committee members drafted a usability proposal and Paige forwarded them some comments.
- Paige highly recommends the IOPAC committee do what it can to promote the establishment of a usability testing culture with CARLI/I-Share
Announcements
- Paige - 20 of the 65 I-Share libraries are using the new titles list. CARLI staff are maintaining a list of enhancement requests to the New Titles List, to be considered at some future time.
The next meeting was scheduled for Tuesday, June 19th from 2:00 – 4:00 pm.
The meeting was adjourned at 3:00 pm.
|
View Calendar
Email Lists