Present: Ashley Augustiniak, Lee Berry, Ron Brashear, Michelle DiMeo, Hillary Kativa, Stephanie Lampkin, Cat Lu, Gillian Maguire, Erin McLeary, Jay Muhlin, Sarah Newhouse, Patrick Shea, Jim Voelkel
Absent: David Caruso
Updates on soft launch and usability testing
- MD: We tested first-time users from all across CHF, selected 10 out of 15 for broad demographic: researchers, general public, the uninitiated, ages
- Gave them a few tasks, screencast, took notes, got lots of data out of it that is informing how we're changing layout, design, and some stuff to discuss with the committee
- In soft launch means discoverable, but not fully indexed in Google yet, slowly happening, such as unexpected Beckaman find
- Users are diverse and international (i.e. coming from Malta and South Korea, etc.)
- Not linking to main CHF website, and not promoting yet
- Good news is servers and web service stable so far!
- Metadata - subjects/topics
- Users searched for a topic and were confused by search results.
- Proposed fix is to rank Subjects higher than Description in relevancy ranking.
- Reminder: subject cataloging should follow "about-ness" (not tagging for "of-ness" – that info can be in description). See Cat's original metadata guidelines.
- Rights Statement
- Users find RS.org to be confusing - the problem is they click on the rights statement and they don't understand what they're reading, much more used to CC & PD licenses
- We added a Public Domain checkbox under search for user who would rather have less but quickly know they can use it
- No Known Copyright and No Copyright US not discoverable currently in "Public Domain Only" - is that okay? How to address?
- AA: If someone wants PD, they just want to search very quickly
- GM/HK: more research focused users may know more about navigating rights, or would contact R&R
- LB: No Copyright-US, as a blogger am I meant to walk away with the expectation that I can use that image?
- HK: CHF should assess its risk tolerance about being reasonably sure that a No-C-US can be labeled PD instead
- GM: What about taking a more conversational approach in the page design with RS.org statements/icons. Such as: "can i use this? yes! probably, etc."? (might be more confusing)
- RB: Going with PD checkbox seems a decent start, can see how things go
- MD: Going forward, curators might reconsider No Known Copyright and No Copyright US on a case-by-case basis and put Public Domain if reasonably sure. Use admin notes field to provide more details. Curators can do this knowing they have DCC support, and if potential copyright holder contacted us we would immediately take it down.
- Language
- German/Latin long titles that confused users, partly because they couldn't read the language.
- Do we flip current standard and put English as primary title and original language as alternative title? Could help general public.
- Concerns: CHF has an international audience; Researchers could be more confused if they're looking for a title that they know exists in a different language; Not comfortable advocating for English-first as an institution
- RB: Still in discovery phase, need more researchers (particularly those who work with these materials); let's wait and see if we get push-back
- MD: File it for more user testing; follow-up with JV to discuss manuscripts such as Newton that may be causing unique problems
- Preview of redesigned show page on staging
- Lots of oohs and aahs!
Timeline to hard launch and priorities
- Told to hard launch with the rebrand - don't know details yet
- Color and styling on DC will be the same as new website, institutional titles will be changed, not sure where it will sit on the webpage
- Have 108 open issue tickets, now Anna gone and just Jonathan, so we'll be prioritizing issues; no new feature requests
- Would want links in OPAC to records following hard launch - integrations, talk to Andrea
- AA: Can we tell fellows to use it yet?
- MD: Not yet, partly because we want to user test it with them
Approve new credit line to be used after re-branding
- Right now it's "Courtesy of CHF Collections"
- Need to recommend to Communications team with new Science History Institute name
- GM: Do we really need "Courtesy of?" Most agreed yes, particularly EM.
- RB: Feeling fine about dropping the "Collections" part because the assumption is there, Science History Insitute not as confusing as Chemical Heritage Foundation
- Additional Credit Line field required for things like Neville? Needs to be same for Digital Collections as rest of website
- RB: Don't recall ever seeing formal documentation, knows it was agreed upon, but will look into that with Suzanne to see if we are bound to that
- May come up in the future with March of Dimes. Can add field then. Museum had no other use case for this field at the moment.
- GM/SL: Want to consider Eddleman and Fisher
- PS: Credit line is different than citations, some of this only comes up for citations. Requests for the citation to be displayed in records – future consideration for feature. Currently citation tools broken.
- Provenance for museum field can be put in the future - needs future research
- Agreed that new credit line is "Courtesy of Science History Institute"
Review new procedure for on-demand photography (R&R)
HK: Discussed new R&R workflow. Changes due to Jay being full-time and Digital Collections being up.
- Highlights from doc: majority of how requests are handled is not changing, Gillian and Hillary will receive requests and search for exisiting images.
- No fees for existing digital images, just a slight service fee for 10+ images
- For new digitization, will refer request to the curator of materials to coordinate with Jay for photography (both internal and external)
- R&R tab on the digitization queue for on-demand photography. Turn around time for on-demand is about 2 weeks for Library and Archives and 4 -6 weeks for Museum
- Old fee structure was around usage, rethinking fee structure toward actual labor involved
- Last year, invoiced 6 requests. This year invoiced 4 so far (out of 70 external requests). So not a lot of work.
- Workflows approved. HK and GM will begin roll-out.