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WebPac Implementation Team : Meeting Minutes

11/9/00, 11-12pm, Baker 158

Present

  • Mark Mounts (co-chair)
  • B. Ghezzi (co-chair)
  • Jennifer Merrill
  • Reinhart Sonnenburg
  • Norma Pellerin
  • Ann McHugo
  • Rebecca Lee
  • Jennifer Nelson
  • Bill Fontaine
  • Paul Merchant (recorder)

Approval of Minutes

Approved Minutes of 11/3/00.

Announcements

Dartmouth will become a beta test site for the Millennium DBM module sometime in the next few weeks.

Report to LOSC

The Team gave a progress report on the WebPAC to LOSC.  For details, see the LOSC minutes from 11/8/00.

Fall seems to be the target release date, so the implementation committee will need to generate a test release in the winter or spring terms.  Exactly how this will be done and whether we will be able to support the BRS catalog concurrently still need to be worked out.

Subgroups

Help Subgroup

The Help Subgroup has met to discuss its charge, develop a timeline, and create guidelines for evaluating help in other WebPACs.

Review Charge

Documentation: The committee reviewed its charge to assess what work lies ahead and what needs to be done before public testing can begin. Discussion focused on documentation and feature set.  The committee felt that written documentation would be less valuable in light of the ample online help that can be included in the WebPAC.  Written materials seem more valuable to promote the new system and make people aware of its advantages.  The committee will ask LOSC for clarification about the scope of printed documentation for the new WebPAC.

For publicity, Mark will talk with STDC and the USC Publicity Committees about ways to advertise the new system.  Promotion of the new system needs to start well before September.  The committee will target late winter or spring term to start advertising the new system to avoid surprising the campus at the start of the fall.  One concern is how to make sure patrons understand this is a distinct system, since at some point we may have four different interfaces to the catalog. (DCLOS, DCIS, DCIS/WWW and WebPAC).

Roll out

The committee is eager to make the new system available to as wide an audience as possible as soon as possible.  A three-stage rollout was decided on.

Stage 1 will involve created a "punch-list" of items that must be fixed to make the main features functional.  This will include implementing the main menu and button designs, fixing the limit function (particularly material type) and major display issues (hiding internal notes, location displays, call numbers in the export short display, and URLs in records).

Stage 2, targeted for early winter term, involves staff testing.  During this time smaller issues and issues discovered by staff will be addressed.  Patron initiated functions will be refined during this time to prepare for public use.

Stage 3, public testing will commence after the committee is satisfied that important and resolvable issues discovered during stage 2 have been corrected.

Bill will start a document that outlines the stages leading to the rollout and the issues to be resolved for each stage.

Some questions were left for consideration:

  • The Export to EndNote screen display appears to be broken, can it be fixed?
  • How can we get people to try the new system during the testing stages?
  • Can we continue to support the BRS catalog simultaneously?