Present: Bartley, Cohn, Horowitz, Locknar, McReynolds, Noga, Perkins (minutes), Rostoff, Sweeney

1.  Announcements: 
Angie: 

Georgiana:

  • Nicole and Georgiana have been working on the new Virtual Reference Collection page, which is nearly ready for roll-out in beta mode.  The page has been re-engineered using del.icio.us software.  Some re-organization work remains; RISG may want to work on this.

 
2. Assessment project:

The remainder of the meeting was devoted to a discussion of how the RISG assessment project is taking shape.  The project focuses on awareness of our subject pages by students, faculty, and library desk staff.  Data compiled thus far was presented and discussed:

Web hits on subject pages: 

Lisa S. has compiled data from  http://libraries.mit.edu/usage/  with number of hits per subject page per month.  Data for the Subject Guides page (the listing of all guides), Publication Types page, Ask Us, and the GIS home page were included for comparison. 

  • The number of hits on the Vera page would also be useful for comparison.
  • Lisa also demo'd the capabilities of the web tool crazyegg.com for getting data on web page use, including the number of clicks on each part of a web page.

Library Survey data:

Anita distributed data from the 2005 Survey:  a summary of awareness levels for undergrads within year; undergrads overall; grad students; faculty, plus several charts and scatterplots.   Data is in the Survey Data folder in R:\RISG.

Anecdotal data:

Alan reported on responses to a request to subspec-lib for their observations.

MIT links to subject pages:

The group discussed Peter's report consisting of a list of subject and publication type pages and, for each, the number of links from "outside" MIT web pages.   A list of the "linked from" pages would also be useful (see Action items, below). 

User Needs Assessment:

We have not looked at this yet.  Maggie noted that quantitative data from this project is being loaded into DSpace, and she will find out if this data is available.  [Note:  Maggie subsequently reported that the User Needs study does not provide data relevant to this project.]

Staff awareness:

The group discussed data compiled by Lisa H. from the 2005 staff self-assessment exercise based on the core competencies

 
3.  Assessment: Next steps 

To enable us to measure progress when the next Library Survey is undertaken, we need to establish a baseline of current awareness of subject pages within these categories:

  • Students  -  undergrads overall; grads overall; by department
  • Faculty
  • Library front-line staff

Action items:

  • Maggie and Lisa H. (User Interface Group members) will explore how UIG and RISG might collaborate to enhance the impact of subject pages.
  • Each person who presented data at today's meeting will put together a summary of their findings and place it in the R:\RISG folder.  Deadline:  June 20.  (No need to include spreadsheets or other raw data, which will be assembled in an appendix to the report.)
  • We will see if Peter can include a list of the outside web pages "linked from" in addition to the list of pages "linked to." 

Next meeting:  Wed., June 20, 10-12, Rotch

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