VIVA Outreach Committee

Meeting Minutes: April 12, 2002

Present: Connie McCarthy (chair), Jack Bales, Patricia Butler, Patricia Hardesty (recorder), Esther Onega, and Ginger Young.
Location: Alderman Library at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville

Agenda Items

VIVA Web Pages

The Committee is revisiting the design of the VIVA web; this issue was tabled over a year ago. The desired approach is to provide a gateway with access points targeted to different VIVA audiences and to aim for currency and for consistency across pages. The outcome of the Committee's discussion is summarized below.

1. Side Bar:
   
   The group was in favor of maintaining a consistent sidebar on all pages, with the VIVA logo at top, but to changing the choices to:
   • Electronic Resources [considered more understandable than "Collections"]
   • Libraries
   • New Products and Services
   • Training Events [or Training/Workshops]
   
   On all pages, the VIVA logo would be a link to the VIVA Home Page.
   
   
2. Home page:
   
   The Home Page would contain VIVA's Mission statement (below), and links to three major subpages, all set off by bullets and bolded below. Suggested subpages are indented progressively.
   
   
   • VIVA's Mission
     
     • VIVA's mission is to provide, in an equitable, cooperative and cost effective manner, enhanced access to library and information resources for the Commonwealth of Virginia's non-profit academic libraries serving the higher education community.
   • Faculty and Students
     
     • Databases - alphabetical
     • Databases - subject
     • Databases - type
     • Online Journal Locator
     • Off-campus Access
     • Libraries
   • For VIVA members
     
     • VIVA Facts:
       
       1. Announcements
       2. Brochure
       3. Fact Sheet
       4. Press Releases
       5. Statistics
     • VIVA People:
       
       1. Committees
       2. Directories/Contact information
       3. Training/Workshops
       4. Travel Memo
     • VIVA Products:
       
       1. Databases by Vendor
       2. Training Databases and Access
       3. Technical Information
       4. Vendor Information
   • Impact of VIVA
     
     1. Mission Statement
     2. Brochure
     3. Voices of VIVA
     4. VIVA in the News
     5. Press Releases
     6. Fact Sheet
     7. Budget and Financial Benefits
     8. VIVA Member Libraries

Action Items from the Outreach Committee

The Committee worked on the following recommendations and questions for Connie to present to the Steering Committee in June. Ginger would email the outline to the Outreach Committee and Connie would share our web outline with Kathy for feedback.

1. Recommendations:
   • The Outreach Committee would work on VIVA pages for consistency and currency of information, format, usefulness for different audiences
   • The Outreach Committee would work with others in VIVA to develop protocols for making changes to the web.
   • VIVA would discontinue the paper directory and list that information on the web site, linked as both html and pdf (possibly built from an Access file).
   
   
2. Questions:
   • Archival issues: Should everything in VIVA's history be on the web page or should it be archived?
   • Webmasters: Can we identify who is doing work on the web? Who has what permissions? Where are the servers located? Can we meet?

Ginger would ask John Duke to swap out the old VIVA brochure and replace it with the new one.

Information Literacy Packets and Gateway

Pat Butler brought up the question of when and if we would be taking up the task of creating the followup website for the Information Literacy Forum. We decided to tackle this after the web redesign project is completed.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be set for the fall.

Respectfully submitted,

Patricia Hardesty
Secretary
May 15, 2002