Minutes of the March 30, 2005 TERMinators meeting

Minutes of 03/30/05 TERMinators meeting

Present: Mark Dehmlow, Nastia Guimaraes, Alan Krieger, Mary Lehman, Tom Lehman, Laurie McGowan, Kathie Ryan-Zeugner, Linda Sharp, Cheri Smith

To assist in the group's review of the Formats term "Electronic books and texts," Tom distributed his one-page handout "Proposed guidelines for assigning DDW vocabulary terms." He's hoping to develop statement of principles to use in assessing the non-Subject terms assigned to non-e-journals at the time of conversion from the Gateway to the DDW. From among the proposed guidelines, Tom highlighted point 3, "Assign one term from Formats, Resource tools, or Genres indicating the most prominent or important aspect of the resource."

Discussion followed, with a range of opinions expressed about the proposed guidelines. Some stated it seems too restrictive to assign only one term from among the three different facets: Formats, Resource tools, and Genres. Some find a term such as "Electronic books and texts" applied too liberally. No one is calling for the terms to be applied exhaustively.

The assignment of terms from other than the Subject facet has an important role in both the presentation of library e-resources in the University-wide portal and the groupings of facet/term combinations at the bottom of each subject page in the DDW. These should be helpful for resource discovery, in contrast to known-item searching.

We turned to the list of 200+ DDW resources to which the Format term "Electronic books and texts" has been assigned. There was such a range of opinion about the appropriateness of assigning the term in specific cases that we agreed to divide up the list and, as a first pass, mark the resources for which we believe "Electronic books and texts" is clearly inappropriate. We are to work on this outside the meeting.

Next meeting in two weeks: Wed., Apr. 13th.

--Mary Lehman