Hours: 7 Total Hours: 45
I started my day by creating a Google Doc for Kellen of the metadata used for books in the Digital Commons, and sent it to him to see if they would work for the Diaries. I then summarized my usability notes in another Google Doc.
Jane emailed me, then, asking if I could check copyright on all the papers of the Engineering professor she was meeting with in the afternoon. I spent the rest of my morning, and a bit of time after lunch checking SHERPA/RoMEO and the publishers’ websites, trying to ascertain whether his various articles and conference papers were available to be put into our Digital Commons.
At 2, I met with Amy who is a Cataloging and Reference Librarian. She is the Library Liaison for Nursing, Health & Sports, and Equine Science. She is also on the Common Book, Information Literacy Outcomes, Hours, and OPAL committees and a Member of the School of Professional Studies. She also takes care of discards, and gives presentations about reference and the digital commons.
After this meeting, and before my meeting with Becky, I summarized my usability notes, checked my usability steps list, and emailed both of these documents to Jane.
Then I met with Becky, who works in Circulation, and takes care of student billing, purchasing library equipment, course reserves, summer inventory and the bike program. The bike program is a pretty cool idea, I think. They have 32 bikes which students can check out for a week at a time and use around campus. She has a partnership with a nearby bike repair shop to keep the bikes in working order, too.
To finish out my day, I used a Library Website Usability Checklist to go over the site, and emailed Jane the things on the checklist that were missing. Then I went down to her office to discuss the week and plan for Monday when she would not be working. Going through the list, she asked me to create a list of Jargon that currently appears on the website, and asked me to talk to Stephen about getting more information on the Archives page. We talked about sections that could benefit from RSS, and she explained that the New Items page was generated by a PERL script that converts the list to HTML, and that if I could find one that converted to XML, we could then have an RSS on that page. We also talked about her goals with the usability study. She wants to test the overall design of the library website, and the contents and structure of the Digital Commons.