2017-11-01 Advisory Group

Discussion of Everything is Miscellaneous - 

Chapter 2

Question 1: Imagine a world where alphabetization was a new and revolutionary concept. What would you consider to be equally new and revolutionary (and perhaps disconcerting) in our day?

Question 2: What does a post-alphabetization world look like?

• hashtags, a type of topical tagging or folksonomy
• automatic clustering

Question 3: Consider the example of the cookbook at the end of the chapter. Can we fit the library website into this metaphor?

• different people can organize their cookbooks in different ways
• but you could organize your cookbook in different ways for different events
• each user has unique needs when visiting the website, and those needs can change depending on an assignment or time of year
• another example if periodic table of elements - one organizational model to visualize the relationships between the elements - but you could take the same metadata and take a different visualization using the same bits of metadata
• different methods lead a search on a different path - for example if you know what you're looking for vs. going to a certain region to browse.
• possible downsides - there's no shared text or shared view -
  • each patron experiences a path that is unique to them which could cause confusion
  • a book has boundaries 
• we don't use consistent terms when searching - perhaps librarians use consistent classification schemes, but our users don't necessarily know what terms to use when searching.
  • Would be interested to link terms that our users use to what we use to label items on the website or in search

• Survey has six questions to find out what patrons come to the website to do and what is important to them to be on the website.
• Email went to all staff on Wednesday 10/26 asking staff to forward to listservs or groups
• Beginning 11/1, the survey will pop-up on the public computers and it's on the website and will be promoted on Facebook/Twitter
• Between 10/26 and 11/2, we received 104 responses, majority faculty right now
• Also have a paper version for the service desks
• The first two questions will also be on the whiteboard
• Survey runs through the end of November
• We may follow up this survey with surveys specific for Law and HSL websites

First page - home page, including separate home pages for all of our branch campuses/units within the library

Second page - search results

Third page - rendered content - content could be coming from any number of our CMS (libguide, Drupal, WordPress, etc)

We will revisit this concept as we proceed in this project. 

Initial Process and Results

• Going through the website and going through lists compiled during WSG to look at each page on the website. 
  • Looking at links on webpages
  • Looking at when the content was created/last updated
• Putting everything together in a big spreadsheet
  • Each top level navigation has it's own worksheet in the Excel workbook
• Examples: 
  • On services page, we have a section for "scholarly communications" and a section for "scholarly communication"
  • I am evaluating the content as well and we will eventually review/consolidate/update this information
  • Not all of these pages are currently active or are not linked to

Web Content Governance and Structure

• Part of this website redesign process will also be to determine authority and governance over specific topics
• Hopefully, we can avoid this duplication of the website/LibGuides, etc.

Next Steps

• Going page by page and describing the content that is available on the page
• Eventually, we'll designate a group of people to review each page/group of pages.

As we begin to review content, rewrite what needs rewritten and conslidate what needs to be consolidate, then we will tag each page or piece of content with one or more of the following: 

• Buildings
• Spaces
• Collections
• Resources
• Events
• People
• Groups
• Services

A patron will still be able to browse the website, there will still be a navigation structure. But everything will also be indexed and tagged in Solr and so patrons will be able to retrieve web content as search results along with holdings and other things.

In between sprints right now

• The last sprint finished up last week and was focused on electronic resources
• Erin Finnerty was integrated into the development team for this sprint.
• We will continue to bring people in for various sprints depending on the topic/task
• Next sprint will focus on request features in Blacklight

Test Queries

• A subset of the Strategic Partners is working on developing test queries to use when testing Blacklight.
• Membership is Jackie Sipes, Brian Boling, Katy Rawdon, led by Emily.