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Structure Study Committee Meeting - September 22, 2008

September 17, 2008 10:12 AM | General

The following materials were distributed for the Structure Study Committee meeting on September 22, 2008:

Reminder: Meeting notes only a draft until approved by Committee

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October 13, 2008 03:18 PM | Posted by Donovan Lambright

I emailed the following response to Bonnie on 09-19-2008 and intended to post it here as well. Intentions aside, it slipped off my to-do list. I'm adding it now to complete the record.
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Bonnie:

I'm sorry you had difficulty with the comments on the Structures Blog. I can offer a little background on the problem, which may or may not have been the same problem you had.

No one is perfect and the problem Ann encountered with comments turned out to be self-inflicted. The comment she was trying to create was lengthy and she typed it up in Microsoft Word to take advantage of its superior text editing capabilities. Having completed the comment, she copied and pasted it into the Comment webform. Upon submitting the comment, the content management system that runs our website gave her an error message and the comment was lost.

As you may already know, Microsoft Word creates a lot of code in documents besides the text. Usually, this code is invisible and includes metadata such as document creation date and identity of the author. It also includes lots of code controlling formatting and character sets. Documents created with Word (and most other modern word processing applications) are quite complex under the hood. All this formatting code can wreck havoc with webforms, including ours. It's a fairly common problem on the internet; I got bit by it once pasting some Word text into a Blogger blog. When Ann rekeyed her comment in Notepad, she was able to copy, paste, and submit it successfully.

I don't know if this was the same problem you had, Bonnie. If it was not, please give me a call and I'll be happy to take a look. If all else fails, we will be happy to post the comment on your behalf under your name. My understanding is that the Help Desk technician who took your call this morning offered to do this and was declined.

It is true that we had an issue with the Structure Blog archives earlier this year. I would point out, however, that the issue involved the months being listed alphabetically instead of chronologically. While this was hardly optimal (and has since been fixed), I'm not aware of any time during which the Structures Blog did not have an archives listed in the left-hand sidebar.

Finally, I'd like to offer a clarification on how the Structures files were moved. They were not posted to the SELCO Librarian and moved to the Structures Blog. In fact, they were in a different blog on our old website and were moved from there to the SELCO Blog when the website went live.

Please note that I have not commented on your thoughts regarding the Structures Committee. Your opinions are yours and it is not my wish to argue with you. I'm simply adding a little more information on some of the technical issues raised in your email.

September 20, 2008 10:09 AM | Posted by Bonnie Adams

COMMENTS ON ALLAN NILSON'S LETTER

I read Allan Nilson's comments to the last Structure meeting which I attended. I appreciate his
explanations of the committee's thought processes and certainly do not wish to question his
dedication (and that of the committee) nor minimize the incredible amount of work that has gone
into this process. However, I do think that he does not realize how very difficult it has been to
find information about the Structure process from the SELCO website.
Since I was the person who commented on this at the meeting, I would like to provide a little
more information. I started looking for information about this process in the spring of this year.
At the time that I first started checking, there was no listing of archives in a sidebar. I am sure
there was probably another way to reach them but I never found it. When the archive list did
appear this summer, very few of the links worked. I did accidentally stumble on a Structure page
that included a merged document showing all of the models that had been considered and the
pros and cons of each. But this was not an easy find. When I pointed this out to some of the other
directors that shared my interest, I had to list a long path to follow to find it sort of like leaving
bread crumbs in the forest. It was not on the structure blog!

I have run across link problems with the new website frequently in the past year. When I have
reported problems with links or access, I am usually asked why I want this information so I have
pretty much given up asking. However, after Ann sent out the response to the advisory committee
questions in August, I noticed immediately that the links she listed did not work. I therefore sent
out a letter to all of the directors with an attachment of the master merged document telling them
where to find it. I also called the help desk to report the problem. The next day Donavan sent an
email to all explaining that the links had apparently been broken when they brought up the new
website in June of 2007. The links were repaired and documents, etc were moved over to
structure blogs.(The merged document that I was talking about finally appeared in the March
blog as well It was not there at first.)

I think this (along with time constraints) explains quite well why the directors were not finding
information about the structure committee. I think it would have been better to have sent a copy
of the master document with all of the structures that were considered to all of the directors to
look at. It could have been done quite easily through dirpub - certainly taking no more time than
posting on the blog.

I am certainly not complaining about the enormous amount of effort that the SELCO staff uses to
keep the SELCO website up and running. It can be a wonderful source of information. However,
it is very large and very complex which means that it can take a lot of time to find things,
something few of us have. Also, its very complexity means that it is not uncommon for there to
be missing links. For example, after the links for the Structures blog were fixed and files moved
from the SELCO librarian blog to the Structures Blog, the Librarian blog ended up with a large
number of archives and topic key words that have broken links.

Bonnie Adams

SELCO/SELS

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Structure Study Committee Meeting - September 22, 2008

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