WST Minutes

Date: May 3, 2000

Location: Kentucky Building

Members Present: Bryan Carson, Jonathan Jeffrey, Rosemary Meszaros, Donna Parker, Sandy Staebell, and Haiwang Yuan

1. Haiwang's announcement: 1) WST has purchased Adobe Acrobat 4.0 that enables HTML link to be clickable in PDF documents 2) WST is going to purchase the service of LinkAlarm to check external links of TIP and other pages for a minimal annual fee to keep UL web page maintenance efficient and cost-effective
2. Haiwang's report: 1) TIP's publicity efforts are going well: a) Haiwang and Earlene, Coordinator of Marketing and Special Events, worked out a news release and looked at other channels; b) Announcement of TIP was made at the April Joint KLA and SLA Spring Conference; c) A review article by Haiwang will appear on the coming issue of LIRT News; d) Proposals for presentation at the coming KLA and Internet Librarians conferences have been submitted; and e) Haiwang will present TIP at the WKU Computer Camp in May and CTL's Summer Workshop in June, 2) Haiwang also reported that responses from faculty users on TIP were positive
3. Haiwang briefed on new developments occurring to TIP after its April 12 release: 1) the "Search WKU Libraries Online Catalog and Databases" page has been revised per the request of Elaine, Coordinator of Electronic Information, to make information more accurate and consistent with the UL Home Page, 2) a free counter with visitor statistics was installed on the TIP's home page, 3) a "Business & Industry" subject was added to the directory of web pages per the request of a business professor
4. WST members overviewed TIP and decided that maintenance would be done on two fronts: 1) using LinkAlarm service to monitor links and 2) keeping track of emerging web sites as potential replacement of out-dated sites in TIP
5. To answer the question of how to tell TIP from UL Home Page, WST members suggested 1) "Help" file be created on the home pages of either UL web site or TIP to explain the different and yet complimentary functions of the two sites, and 2) possibilities of streamlining the UL Home Page to accommodate TIP's permanent presence on the page in place of the current animation linkage and reduce content redundancy. Bryan agreed to work on a mock prototype that would combine "Library Services" with "Research Instruction" and integrate "Electronic Resources" into TIP on the UL Home Page, and Jonathan will work on the TIP access help file from the UL Home Page's extra space as a result of Bryan's streamlining efforts
6. WST appreciated Elaine and David's initiative to streamline the electronic resources on the UL web site after the U of L and UK models, combining the "funded" and "non-funded" resources into one page, thereby eliminating confusions faced by the users. WST will do everything to accommodate the change both on the UL Home Page and TIP. The end result will be consistency between TIP and UL web site, ease of use by our users void of confusion
7. WST members have brainstormed and planned in the past few days online to give all the UL web pages a new look. Haiwang has implemented the change as of May 3, 2000. The changes include a color scheme to the navigation menu links on the left of each page, which features TIP at the top of the menu. WST members reviewed and endorsed update and recommended to the CLDH for further review and the Dean for approval
8. Future WST meetings will take place on the second Tuesday of every Month. The next meeting is set at 1:30 p.m. on June 13, 2000 in Helm 5

for WST

Haiwang