Meeting with Michael Widener 9/29/2004

The meeting was scheduled to address some of the graphics-related issues, and to see about setting up a Saturday session – to facilitate those group members unable to visit the Law Library during the week.

Dr. Widener did offer the possibility of coming having a Saturday session on 10/16, but would have to check his personal schedule and get back with us. The Law Library’s hours on Saturday are 10-6, and I told him we would probably take no more than an hour and a half or two hours. It was left to his discretion when that might occur. If 10/16 does not work out, we won’t be able to work in a Saturday until November.

Our issue with the header not working correctly was in relation to an inability to access the Law Library style sheet. As of 10/2, that has been fixed.

As for some preliminary feedback on our pop-up menus, Dr. Widener was non-plussed with the idea – not that he didn’t like the design – more that he was certain that the Law Library Webmaster would not allow java scripting on their site. He definitely preferred a static menu, that would be identical on each page, save for the fact that the current page in the menu not be a link, and thereby acting as a clue to location.

He did like the way that we had multiple ways of breaking down the entries, but mentioned that we are probably creating too much work in breaking things down by year, as each bibliographic entry at the bottom of the author entries points to a separate holding. We may need to rethink slightly and place author ranges in a rough chronological order.

Dr. Widener wanted us to let him know exactly how to keep the pages updated. We agreed upon use of comments within the html (for any information, such as image size, that can’t be easily discerned from the code), and a template file to keep new information consistent with what we finally end up with.

Dr. Widener also discussed the inclusion of some sort of bread-crumb trail, so that the user has an easy time figuring out where s/he is than within the overall Law Library site. We also came to an agreement that the rarebook frontpage do a bit of selling for the collection. He loved the idea of giving credit to the top donors, and warmed to the idea of presenting the physical space of the collection, if that might bring more users in. He did prefer that we put a complete index on a single, easily updateable page – mostly to reduce his work when things need to be added. I suggested keeping our structuring ideas, but presenting them on a single page, which he thought was great. It seemed that he hadn’t thought of trying to selling the place of the collection to encourage people to come in, and saw a little more value in using the front page as a showcase for the collection’s issues of pride, and suggested linking to the Millionth Volume page: http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/conference/mvolume.html I was also given a photocopy of the essay Dr. Widener wrote on that volume for the 2001 conference, Language and the Law, which might also be included on out site, as well. I will run copies for delivery at our meeting Sunday.