Minutes of the Feb. 27, 2007 TERMinators meeting

Present: Marina, Ben, Chris, Hector, Nastia, Mary, Tom

We discussed where we were as a group, as we hadn't met since Nov. 2006. We had been working on "Guidelines for assigning resource to the DDW general pages," looking at Chris' harmonization of Marina's and Ben's drafts. Tom brought the group up to date on the Collection Development forum meeting where he had presented the guidelines and the application of the guidelines to the General and Multidisciplinary resources.

Cheri mentioned in the meeting that she had spent some time reviewing the Social Sciences General resources, and that according to the guidelines we were proposing, many of them would have to go, leaving, for example, no good resource covering psychology. The issue was raised of whether totally generic General pages are useful. Carole mentioned that much research is cross disciplinary, and the General pages are meant to support that.

Tom asked how we thought this sort of discrepancy should be resolved. If selectors are solely responsible for the content of pages, we don't need a 'Guide to selecting resources for the DDW'. Marina asked on what basis Cheri had made selections for the Social Sciences General page. None of the General pages has a designated librarian, resources were assigned by volunteers. We agreed that the Guidelines are important. Tom handed out the latest version of the Guidelines and asked each to review it prior to our next meeting, where our goal will be to finalize it.

We discussed the state of the three remaining General pages (General and Multidisciplinary is finished). We seem to have done work on all, but Tom didn't have copies of our decisions on Arts and Humanities General and Science and Technology General. Marina gave Tom her copy of our Arts and Humanities General decisions, anyone having a copy of our Science and Technology decisions is asked to pass it on to Tom.

We spent the rest of the time discussing audiences. Eric has requested that TERMinators create an audiences facet that would be used to designate the appropriate audience for a resource or service. This would have several potential uses; when the MyLibrary component of the library website is implemented, and people can log in and customize their version of the website, having an audience facet would make it possible to present persons logging in for the first time with a list of resources based on their institutional affiliation and status. Additionally, it would make possible various views of data; e.g. resources good for undergrads, or for advanced researchers.

There was considerable skepticism and opposition expressed to this idea:

• Has this idea been requested by users?
• Have other libraries done this and found it useful?
• What is the problem this is trying to solve?
• It's not possible to say who a particular resource is good for. A resource mainly used by advanced researchers might be needed by an undergraduate in some cases.
• Giving people the ability to select resources for their own version of the library website is a good idea, as individuals are the best qualified to say what resources they need; however, choosing resources that are good for individuals based on affiliation and status isn't workable.

At the end of the meeting, we decided to invite Eric to our next meeting in two weeks.

-- Tom