• How much time we need for training?  Remlee will schedule 4 or 5 trainings throughout July now, and send out a call for who wants to do which session.  Who to invite?
    • Lets plan on hour long sessions. (And have drop in for hands on?) Angie had a question about whether or not we can use libguides for staff. Remlee will check with Nicole but our charge is really to deal with the public web pages. Remlee will send the invite to ps-lib & ask Nicole if directing the training at public services staff is ok for now.
  • Keep on dissecting...  Talk about:
    • Tabs: How many tabs? We don't want too many so that they are overwhelming.  We decided to limit the number of tabs to 1 row. 
      • What about subtabs?  We won't legislate, just ask people to keep simplicity in mind. having subtabs could help with the busy feel with them --you can put less on a page with subtabs. If you feel the need for many subtabs consider reorganizing your pages, creating multiple pages or sticking with dreamweaver.
      • When given an option when adding links we should tell people to choose open in a new window. The default when you click a tab that links to another page seems to be to open in a new tab. However, IE seems to behave differently. Someone (Nicole?) will need to look at this.  We looked at whether links added should open a new window, new tab or in the same window.
      • Remlee will see if they can get the icon that is 2 boxes to go away. It isn't intuitive what it means.
    • Page shortcuts- (ie the simple urls.) --We should require everyone to use them and make them concise, not already used and intuitive.
    • Comments feature-You can have comments for a whole page and individual boxes. Currently it is set up to be moderated. Should we limit in any way? No, we won't limit but we will include in documentation that you can disable.
    • Page Categories/Subject categories: Right now setup as 7 subjects see libguides home. We want to be able to associate to multiple subjects. Also, what subjects should there be there? It doesn't now match to Vera subjects. There isn't consistent between the subject guides listings, the Vera subjects listing and the Vera Multisearch. Maggie will talk to Nicole and UIG.  We're leaning toward the subject guide categories but this leaves out the stuff we need that are interdisciplinary (for instance publication types.) We would like to be able to list guides under multiple subjects. Can list under multiple guides as an administrator but Remlee will look into making it possible for all authors to do this.
    • Guide Statuses: Do we ever want to have libguides be private (as opposed to unpublished.)? Private will be good for internal use and for sharing drafts with others. 
    • Page layout
      • Columns: Do we want to recommend 2 vs. 3 columns.  We want to keep the righthand column as informational--like the profile etc. Other than that, we won't legislate.  We realized that we could delete a contact box, add a box in its place and then use rich text to manually to put in contact information in a less rigid way than the defaults on the profile box. This gets around the contact me for groups etc. quandry.
      • Number of boxes on a page: Do we want to have guidelines for how many boxes should be on a page? Seems to be hard to legislate. If theres lots of scrolling etc. think of reorganizing.
      • Linking from one libguides page to another libguide: Currently when you do this you only get to the home page of the guide. We want to be able to link to a whole guide (guide with access to the subpages). Is there a workaround? YES!: When adding a new tab don't use COPY PAGE FROM ANOTHER GUIDE, ENTER THE URL FOR ANOTHER GUIDES.
      • When people should link to, instead of copy. (Anytime the content should be maintained by one person.)
  • What else to discuss? Are we going to look at every type of content box and try using them so we could make recommendations, handy tips and explanation of each of them.  We decided to divide them up:
    • Peter: Rich text/Dynamic Content/scripts, RSS feeds
    • Angie: Embedding video and interactive polls, user link submission
    • Remlee: Remote script box, pod cast, web links
    • Maggie: Date and Events, Documents & Files
    • Georgiana: Tag Cloud, Books from the catalog
    • Do this by TUESDAYS MEETING. 

Action items:

  • Everyone should look at the box types that they choose by Tuesday, if possible.
  • Remlee will update the guidelines page with info from today's discussion.

Next meeting:

  • Talk about boxes we should have that everyone can link to (like the search our collections box). Are there others?? Or other tools? -Bibliographic software, the search widget. 
  • Look at Post to LibGuides button.
  • Look at box types.
  • Should we use tags?
  • Anything to discuss about search box at top?
  • Talk about integrating research guides with database listings.
  • What else would we like to see on tools template page that Nicole is making?
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