I-Share OPAC Team
Agenda for Wednesday, July 19, 10:30am
Location: CARLI Office
Logistical items:
- Directions to the meeting: http://www.carli.illinois.edu/about/carlioff-dirs.html
- Please remember to register for lunch! http://office.ilcso.illinois.edu/fm/meals/meal2.htm
Preliminary information:
- The roster and charge for the new team can be found at: http://www.carli.illinois.edu/comms/i-share_opac.html
Agenda:
First priority
- Select someone to take minutes
General overview of WebVoyage in the CARLI environment (Paige)
- Various instances of WebVoyage, and how they differ
- Who customizes, and what can be customized?
High priority future projects:
- Develop a mediated process for WV customization or a customizing wizard (the pre-set "skins" approach or a template to set up color changes), and redesign training for customizers accordingly
- Reevaluate search types currently offered in WV, and which indexes they include; consider changes and additions
- Indexes have been created that would allow users to search with an initial article and still find the item they’re looking for; should we add these indexes to the current left-anchored title searches?
- Consider adding a Title Words search (default operator AND) to the default (and I-Share) QuickSearch page
- Consider adding the HKEY (holdings keyword search) index to the list of "core" searches to be enabled in every database, so that it shows up on the Advanced Search page's dropdown list in every WV instance
- Test and incorporate into the I-Share default the new keyword-in-headings search capability
- Add a spell checking tool
Other possible future projects and ideas to consider:
- Display:
- Add format icons, such as for book, sound recording, serial, etc. AND/OR status icons, such as a green a check mark for "available"
- Nancy is working on some reasonable number of these, plus a catch-all icon for "format unknown" or combination
- Consider adding a colored background or other design element to warning/error/alert messages, as an alternative to making them take up more vertical space in order to get people's attention
- Develop "cool" view buttons like Texas A & M's
- Terminology:
- Re-describe the call number browse as "browse shelf" (or some variation of this)
- Consider renaming "Limits" to "Filters," or something like that
- Functionality:
- Borrow Texas A & M's Perl and JavaScript technique for making the SFX button appear in a reasonable place in WebVoyage, on reasonable records
- Build a search plug-in for people's browsers that will execute an FT* (Any Word Anywhere, relevance-ranked) search in I-Share
- Investigate whether with local code we could make truncmsg.htm or nohitsmsg.htm search type-specific by parsing the search type out of the current URL. For instance, if &Search_Code=JALL or if &SL=Submit%26TYPE%3Das in WV instance XXX, then nohitsmsg.htm could be made to include the suggestion to search http://sfx.carli.illinois.edu/sfxXXX/a-z <http://sfx.carli.illinois.edu/sfxXXX/a-z> (the link would execute the search on the user's search argument)
- Help pages & text:
- Insert some anchors at the top of the MyAccount page, to allow users to jump down to the beginning of the Requests or the Fines & Fees section, since looking at some MyAccount pages can involve a lot of scrolling
- Revise help screens into some more useful format? pop up boxes? more action-specific? recast as answers to FAQs?
- Shoehorn some additional help text onto the "Edit Search" (Search History) page
- Training efforts:
- Create checklist for libraries to use when testing development or upgraded instances of their catalogs
Planning for these future projects:
- What other projects or issues do new & continuing team members suggest? What do we feel should take priority?
- We need to be able to articulate to the Instruction Team what changes we plan to make to WV so they can plan for tutorial changes accordingly
- Develop timelines & tentative plans for next team projects.
Pending issues to address ASAP:
- 505 8X
- OPAC Team needs to approve the addition of this field, which displays a type of contents, to the display.cfg
- 300$e
- Displays accompanying material
- In the past, displayed twice: once under “includes” and once with other 300 fields in the “physical description” section
- Paige proposes: in Full View, stick e back in with the rest of the 300s; in Brief View just display e by itself
- This goes against a standard policy of displaying fields in the same places in the Full and Brief view
- OPAC Team needs to decide how to display this in future
- E-mailing records problem:
- When you e-mail yourself a record, the url is often too long and that leads to a line break that makes the link unusable. Is this important? Do we need to see if this can be fixed?