LE Conference Room

01.09.2008

1:00 PM

Present:  Rich Bennett, Matthew Daley, Jason Fleming, Ed Hart, Marilyn Ochoa, Colleen Seale, Jessica de Perio Wittman

Introductions of the group were made.  Ed officially announced he would be rotating off the SUL OPAC Subcommittee (SUL OPAC).  Ed’s successor, Jessica, was introduced to the group.

Marilyn indicated that Shelley has been invited to the Communications group meeting, but has declined to attend regularly.  Colleen offered to appeal to Shelley again, asking her to come to this forum to help facilitate the decision making process.  Addendum:  In an earlier email Shelley indicated that she wanted to discuss possibly doing a combination of a joint meeting with Colleen and Marilyn with attendance to the Communications meeting to obtain information on Endeca.  Shelley and Marilyn will meet on Monday, January 28.

Colleen named the last agenda items for the SUL OPAC conference call.  She discussed the upcoming OPAC Visioning Summit including draft agenda and session assignments for both she and Jason.  Jason mentioned that the usability/assessment session he was going to lead was dropped due to lack of interest.  It was mentioned that Bill Covey, Michelle Foss, and Betsy Simpson are also attending on behalf of UF.  Colleen indicated that other agenda items of the call were:  FCLA working on the diacritics issue; usability testing; and browse indexes.

A major issue Colleen brought up was with regard to format icons.  Rich tried to clarify some of the information provided in Jimmie’s email of 1/9/08 (8:02 am). Rich suggested that Public Services staff collectively needs to recommend a plan based on what’s best for the patron (e.g. could limiting to 1 or 2 format icons help?  should we develop a hierarchy help to determine what formats are displayed?  if all formats are provided in text in the full record, do all need to be displayed on the basic view? Another question included:  is one media icon sufficient).  It was further recommended that Colleen ask SUL OPAC to charge a special task force to investigate this format icon issue.  Colleen also mentioned that FCLA is looking into the precision of the browse heading searches. 

Colleen distributed the dates of this semester’s SUL OPAC conference calls.  Marilyn asked if Colleen thought that the current day/time for the Communications meeting was appropriate.  This was undecided.

Jason and Marilyn updated on the usability protocol for save/print and browse features.  Marilyn submitted the protocol on Friday, January 4.  While UF, USF and FSU jointly developed the test questions, the point of entry for participants differs between schools.  This may result in some data that cannot be accurately compared in the joint report.  No specific report deadline has been assigned by SUL OPAC.

Rich explained the new <include> file is available for UF to customize on the Basic Search page.  The first set of information added to the file is help text Enter authors, keywords, call numbers, ISSN, ISBN or other numbers. To find an exact phrase, use "quotation marks." To begin in depth discussion about adding more information in this file, Rich is going to draft some information to be sent to Communications after ALA.  The goal is to use effectively the space on the Basic Search page.  Once the Communications group has had a chance to discuss this, Jason indicated that Josh is available to mock up pages to test with staff. 

Marilyn indicated that she and Colleen will meet at the end of the month to discuss Help pages. 

Jason will send out the problem report form that was mocked up last semester.  We will discuss this page at the next Communications meeting January 23, at 1PM.  This meeting will be held in Library East Conference Room.

Jason indicated that Josh is available to meet with the group to discuss Endeca statistics if there is interest; this would have been part of the usability/assessment session during the Visioning Summit.  

Marilyn updated the group on the 120 to 90 day decision for new books.  Betsy Simpson has already informed staff of the change; the Resource Navigation Committee will send out a message Jason composed with information on how to use New Titles (which includes a link to a page designed by Rich).  Ed mentioned that Law would have liked to see a 60 day cutoff.  Rich mentioned that he would put together a document to explain the differences between New Book and New Title designations. 

Holding displays for Autumn and Fall are not being displayed consistently between Aleph and Endeca.  This is fine at the local level.  However, all SUL need to use all lowercase, which is based on the ANSI standard.