Library Technical Services

Michal has been meeting with Jim Reidy, and together they have been creating second level templates in CommonSpot based on our CSS-encoded design. Our site is located at: http://lts.library.cornell.edu:6779/lts/. They continue to use the code that was used in the Engineering site and which we received from Paul Davis.

We had a question about the name of Scott Wicks’ division of Library Technical Services – is it "Acquisitions and Information Organization" or "Acquisitions and Cataloging"?

Action item:

Nancy checked with Karen and the new name is "Acquisitions and Cataloging." Adjustments will be made to the web site.

At an earlier LTS Web redesign meeting, we considered using DSpace to manage LTS procedures. In discussing this topic further, Michal reported that it would require a significant amount of time to investigate the full potential of DSpace in order to determine whether this type of document archival system would accommodate the needs of the LTSWeb site, particularly the procedures & policy sections. In addition, we considered the advantages and disadvantages of using DSpace to manage the procedures.

Advantages

• It would allow for easy creation of "front matter" metadata like author, title, abstract, etc.

• It would allow for easy migration of the procedures; rather than having to "mark them up" HTML every time a new web site was created, we could put them into Word documents that could reside in DSpace and then link to the documents from a new web site every time one was created.

• One-time document manipulation: documents would be manipulated in CommonSpot and these changes would appear in other areas of the site that use the whole document or parts of it.

Disadvantages

• While DSpace metadata is easily searchable, the full text of documents loaded into DSpace is not. We want to be able to search the full text of the LTS procedures.

• A lot of the procedures have hyperlinks embedded in them, linking between documents. Would Word documents stored in DSpace enable us to do this?

In addition, we may not have enough information to make the use of DSpace worthwhile.

Since we are more concerned with searching the procedures and linking between them right now than with migrating them to other versions of the web site in the future, and since we can’t search and link the procedures in DSpace, this is another reason to hold off on DSpace for the time being.

Action item: Nate wrote to David Ruddy and asked to talk with him about recent DSpace developments.

Now that work has begun on the second level templates, we need to begin thinking about how to structure the content of each of the second level sections, whether they are "divisional" or "functional." We’ll begin meeting weekly on Wednesday mornings from 8:15 to 9:45 in Mann B70 to talk about these sections. Beginning lineup:

2/22 – Resources and Tools (Sally)

3/1 – Database Management Services (Michal)

3/8 – Who We Are (Nate)