Minutes of the Aug. 31, 2005 TERMinators meeting

In attendance: Tom Lehman, Mary Lehman, Kathie Ryan-Zeugner, Alan Krieger, Laurie McGowan, Mark Dehmlow

Agenda:

• Meeting Time
• ND Libraries facet
• Documentation

Meeting Time & Schedule

It was mentioned at the beginning of the meeting that we may want to consider in future years going on hiatus through Labor Day to accomodate for the heavy library instruction time period.

We decided to switch the meeting time from 3 - 4 to 3:30 to 4:30 so that the maximum number of members could attend the full meeting. There will be no meetings on 9/7, 9/21, or 10/19.

The October rotation of old members leaving and new members joining will occur on October 12. We would like for both the leaving members and joining members to attend that meeting. Tom will recruit members for the next term of the committee and will make sure to account for needed representation from particular departments. Mark, Alan, and Laurie will be rotating off the committee.

ND Libraries Facet

As we discuss how to evaluate this facet, Tom offered two ways that we could proceed:

1. we could go through the facet and terms at a high level by reviewing them term by term
2. we could look at what is used and what is not and decide what to keep and what to let go. Then we would create definitions for what is left over. We would deal with the resources before dealing with the definitions.

We then had a fairly in depth discussion about the value of classifying library services and other information about the library. It was widely recognized that "about" was a vague term and may need to be broken into multiple, more specific terms and then the resources under it reclassified accordingly. We discussed where the existing terms for the non-content parts of the website came from. Mainly they were ad hoc based on existing terms from the old website and subject pages. We discussed the possible value of building them from scratch.

We wanted to be careful about where in the website things with this facet and corresponding terms would appear. For instance, we wouldn't want the Libraries' history to appear on every subject page or in the eResources A-Z list. Tom described that Rob had made a distinction in the DDW program between public facets and private facets. Public facets show up in the resource lists, like the A-Z and subject pages, while private facets do not. There may need to be some policy set regarding not assigning both a public and a private facet to ND Libraries items so that they don't start showing up in A-Z lists.

We discussed that there are some things, such as approval plans, that may need to be moved from the extranet to the intranet because they aren't quite appropriate for the public website.

We discussed how we might create/edit the terms for the ND Libraries facet. One way would be to use the terms on the left hand, bottom part of the website, "Getting Help," "Library Services," and "Inside ND Libraries" to guide us. Another approach would be to look at the items in these boxes and create terms independent of them.

We also discussed what we should classify. Should we classify everything in the library website? This would likely be somewhat daunting, so we probably wouldn't want to take on classifying everything, but maybe select things, such as hours, etc. Right now, not much is classified, only EndNote and the Resources and Collection Services pages are classified as "services." Other existing services like ILL, etc. are not classified as such.

The rest of our discussion focused on how to determine what should be classified. Was there some kind of test we could develop to determine what should be classified or what should not? We decided we should invite Eric to the next meeting to talk about where the website is going and how classifying services and information about the library would be useful since it was at Eric's request that we look more fully at the facet. The ability to push this information out to other applications like the University portal were well-understood benefits, but it wasn't clear exactly what content would be useful in that context. A user might want to create a portal channel, or portal item, in their space with the library hours, but we felt that they would likely not want to customize information about the history of the library in their portal space. In the end it would be helpful to get a comprehensive picture about the utility of classifying this information and that snapshot would likely help us determine what should and should not get classification.

The committee wondered if DAIAD might be able to perform some user studies regarding what kind of information about the libraries that users would find useful for customizing in a portal environment such as MyLibrary or InsideND. Doing this analysis could help us make informed decisions about what to classify.

Tom will invite Eric to the next TERMinators meeting to continue our discussion about the ND Libraries facet.

Our next meeting will be 9/14.

Respectfully submitted,
--Mark