Present: Dr. Alison Beck, Heather Cura, Gilbert Sosa, Debbie Valle, Dr. Nedal Arar, Alan Miller, Dr. Keith Krolick, Anna Dorrycott, Katie Prentice, Dr. Robert Badgett, Dr. Vid Desibhatla and Jim Barrett.
The chair, Dr. Alison Beck, called the meeting to order. Committee members approved the Feb. 21 minutes. Jim Barrett gave the webmaster's report. He said:- Server traffic in February declined 4 percent, to 1.7 million page views, over the same month in 2006.
- A tryout of the Browsealoud browser plug-in elicited few responses. He said only one of the near-20 members of the Academic Council responded to an invitation Feb. 15 to evaluate the software. The response was negative. He recommended dropping further consideration of purchasing Browsealoud.
- The library and School of Medicine had conferred about GoLocal, the library's database of health practitioners in the South Texas region. Katie Prentice provided details, and said the school was attempting to gather a list of its practitioners with UT Medicine for inclusion in the database.
- RSS, or Real Simple Syndication, has become more useful because newer browsers, such as Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, handle syndications better than in the past. He said an RSS feed has been added to the web site webteam.uthscsa.edu. The committee discussed uses for RSS. Ms. Prentice elaborated on RSS, and said the library plans to offer a class on how end-users can use RSS to peruse the content of journals.
- He had added meta tags in an ongoing experiment to improve search-engine visibility for Spanish-language pages.
- State officials held a meeting last week in Austin to discuss pending new guidelines for web accessibility, particularly in areas addressed in HB 2819, passed in 2005.
In other new business, the committee discussed the potential work requirements for web owners because of the university's branding and marketing initiative. Heather Cura said the amount of work would depend on the scope of the changes. For example, she said, changing the image of the university logo could be done quickly, but larger changes may take more time. Ms. Prentice said the library is redesigning its site, and she would welcome guidance as quickly as possible.
Mr. Barrett said he would like the committee to help prioritize which web sites would need to implement branding changes first. He suggested requiring any web sites with links on the university homepage to make the changes within days. Dr. Keith Krolick suggested inviting Mary Etlinger DeLay, chief communications officer, to the committee's next meeting so she could discuss the scope of work and its timeframe. Dr. Badgett suggesting telling Ms. DeLay that the committee would like to advise on the web implementation aspect of the branding campaign. He suggested in the meantime that the webmaster contact site owners who do not have server-side includes (SSI) on their sites. He said the owners should know that SSIs would speed any content changes they would have to make on their pages.There was no other business, and the meeting was adjourned.
-- Minutes prepared by Jim Barrett
-- Approved April 20, 2007