Minutes of the UTL Web Advisory Committee Wednesday, August 31 , 2011 OISE 3rd Floor KITL

Present: Monique Flaccavento (OISE, chair), Pam King (UTM), Berenica Vejvoda (Robarts, Data), Eveline Houtman (Robarts, guest), Sara McDowell (Robarts CDD), Jen Robertson (Robarts CDD), Judith Logan (Robarts Reference, guest), Patricia Bellamy (Acting Faculty Liaison Co-ordinator), Kate MacDonald (Trinity), Lari Langford (Access & Information Services, Robarts), Rita Vine (Acting Information Literacy Facilitator), Margaret Wall (Robarts), James Mason (Music), Susanne Tabur ( Gerstein), Marc Lalonde (ITS, Robarts), Noel McFerran (SMC)

Regrets: Sarah Forbes (UTSC), Carla Hagstrom (Gerstein), Susan Stone (Robarts Resource Sharing)

1. Welcome and Introduction of New Members – Monique Flaccavento

2. Selection of Minute-taker

- Lari Langford volunteered to take the minutes.

3. Minutes of the August 3rd meeting

- With the change on Page 3 to the word “re-design”, the minutes were approved.

4. Business Arising from the Minutes

- Jen Robertson will chair the Google Analytics Group; Susanne Tabur volunteered to continue in this Group. The mandate is to help evaluate the use of the UTL homepage. Google Analytics was installed in January 2011, but only slightly used, to date.

5. Updates from ITS – Marc Lalonde (Review of new Home-Page)

- Marc began his comments by reminding us of the mantra “Keep Calm. Clear Cache”.

- The new web-site address, prior to launch, is onesearch.library.utoronto.ca. It may go live on Tuesday, Sept. 6, if all goes well.

- The “All” tab on the main search box is to indicate that the contents of all the tabs is being searched. The discussion focused on what other terminology could be used, in light of the fact that it isn’t “all” of the library resources which are being searched, e.g. not Music Index or Government Documents. One suggestion was to call it “One Search”.

- Others felt that this doesn’t fix the problem; John M, pointed out that the new “All” search box is better for undergrads and does provide good, quick results. - We reviewed the layout of the search results from the “All” search to see whether “all” is apparent in the content. It was suggested that the ALL tab could be made larger so that the other tabs look more like subset.s

- Marc noted that “Recommended Databases”, a service of the Serials Solutions’ Summon system, is not yet ready for implementation. Staff are still figuring out how to roll-out this feature.

- Rita Vine expressed the congratulations of the group on the overall look of the new homepage and commented on the “hip design”.

- Questions about what site “research guides” is linking to – LibGuides? Not my.library. When an “All” search is conducted, it does not include my.library.

- It was suggested that a “shell” be made, with a few keywords, in LibGuides, to link to my.library; Patricia Bellamy will ask Sarah Forbes to create a “how-to” video for the librarians’ Libguides site.

- It was suggested that the scrolling on the Workshops menu be slowed down; there was a question re whether all sessions, of the same topic, are displaying.

- Marc reviewed that the “How to” list was removed and a “Quick Links” menu retained; he noted that we would discuss whether some items in this list could be removed, re-ordered, later in the agenda.

- Discussion about whether we need the additional information above the “blue line” prompted a question, from Lari, as to whether this information was needed for those using screen-readers. It was noted that this functionality could be achieved whether these headings were hidden or not.

- We recommended moving the Twitter button closer to “News” and place the UTM and UTSC links to the top left of the screen.

- Marc explained that Gordon Belray is making new banner ads for the libraries; the person at Simcoe Hall responsible for the University’s ads has now moved to a new job. They were to have been working on refreshing the University’s content. There was a question about whether these ads could cycle a little slower.

- The “Library web” tab only searches the “Plone” site; the plan is to implement a server that crawls the whole site.

- The “All” search is retrieving from LibGuides, but why have the heading for the Research Guides in blue? Could it be red?

- There were questions about the searching functionality, e.g. truncation, Boolean, which Marc said would need to be referred to Sian Meikle.

- A suggestion was made to add a link to “About Summon” or “Help” on the results page.

- There was discussion about naming the “subjects A-Z” feature, as well as whether this should be re-ordered to before or after “Popular Databases”? - There was also discussion about including text such as “powered by Summon and presented by UTL” to reflect that an “All” search is an amalgamation of Summon, Endeca, etc.?

6. Quick Links Menu on the new Homepage:

- As the Quick Links menu appears on every page, it was recommended to remove the following items: Catalogue, Find articles, Research Guides, Renew items, TSpace, Interlibrary Loan, my.utoronto, UTORid

- It was agreed that the Committee will begin working on renovating the other drop-down menus and the number of menus, noting that the impact of now being able to search the library web-site may allow for simplification.

7. “Support the Library” button:

- We recommended that the “Support the Library” button be moved to the top right area of the homepage to join the other icons; also, it was suggested that the “mobile” link be changed to an icon.

8. Other Business:

- Noel McFerran asked about the removal of the e-resources tab on the new home-page, as discussed, via e-mail, on the Committee listserv; Marc Lalonde explained that there are changes coming, with the implementation of Serials Solutions and the end of the EIR database: the e-resources will be concatenated, we will implement 360 Marc records, and the Marc record will contain the URL for the resource.

The meeting was adjourned at 4:55 p.m.

The next meeting will be held on Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 3:00 p.m. at OISE, KITL.