| TSWeb Procedures Team Minutes, Aug. 12, 2005 Present: Jim Alberts (chair), Margaret Nichols (recorder), Lois Purcell, Jim Spear, Debra Warfield. Our discussion at this meeting focused on Jim A.'s handout, "LTS Procedures in the grand scheme of things." Below are the points and decisions that emerged from the discussion. Stage One: Bring all relevant online documentation together We need to create a project Web page where links to all the existing documentation can be brought together. Stage Two: Ascertain that procedures are up to date; using existing methods, document and codify principles for making sure that procedures remain current The existing system is: Lois and Deb use a spreadsheet to keep track of when procedures were last updated. All procedures are reviewed at least once per year. Procedure 3 on the CTS Procedures list describes how to write procedures. We will need to come up with a recommendation for keeping the documentation current in the future. Stage Three: Identify lacunae within the procedures; discuss principles for documenting new procedures on an ongoing basis There are still big gaps in the acquisitions procedures. Also, an ongoing issue is that some people continue to use old versions of procedures. For instance, student assistants in training are given old printouts of procedures to use for guidance. Jim A. suggested Lois make an outline of how procedures are currently reviewed and maintained. New procedures are currently subjected to one week of review by everyone before being finalized. We decided we will divide up the procedures by general subject area (e.g., acquisitions, cataloging, catalog maintenance, etc.) to check for gaps. Lois noted that Xin or Scott Wicks might have a list of acquisitions procedures that need updating. Ordering is one area that has gaps in documentation. We need to come up with a recommendation for how to identify and fill gaps in procedures on an ongoing basis. We can use CommonSpot to enable the people who carry out the procedures to write them up. We will also set up a template for the procedures to ensure some uniformity in them. Right now, they vary in their formality and degree of structure. Stage Four: Once procedures are together and duplicates (if found) have been eliminated, recommend a structural and visual layout for them; create formal templates to be used for all procedures In carrying out this part of the project, we should start with the documentation we have now and think how we'd want it to be structured and to look. Having a table of contents within each of the lengthier procedures is very helpful. Also helpful is the sentence at the beginning of some procedures which states the purpose of that procedure. Anchor links from each procedure to the overall table of contents will also be useful. The current long page for the table of contents might be broken up a bit to make it easier to use. We'll work together with the design group on developing a common look and feel for the procedures. Jim Reidy and Melissa Kuo will also be involved in that work; they run the Library server, where our procedures will live. Next steps For the end of next week (Aug. 19), Jim A. will create a project page for our procedures project on the TS Web site. By way of beginning work on Stage One of our project, we also agreed to comb the old CTS Web site (http://www.library.cornell.edu/cts/) for procedures, as follows: Lois will look for procedures (the "how to" parts) in the Voyager Manual. Margaret will look in Network Administration. Deb will look in Recon in Progress. Jim A. will look in Department Information and Metadata Services. Lois will look in Working Documents and Archived Resources. Jim A. will look in the Music Cataloger section. Jim S. will look in the MARC Record Sets and Macro Express sections. Meeting time We agreed that Friday mornings are a good meeting time for our subgroup. |