Web Team Agenda Thursday 12/3
Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving break!
Notes, time-keeper, laptop?
Announcements/updates?
-New timeline?
-Web team goals
-Web team assessment – changed to the 17th for 2.5 hours – OK?
-Vote on whether or not to add 1 more subpage from the LIS Search landing page: LIS liaison profiles (from meeting on 11/19)
-Can the LIS landing page include the list of liaisons (this was tabled in a previous meeting)? (Carrie)
-Where is “Teaching and Learning” on the LIS landing page going to? (Carrie)
-Can we list all LIS blogs on the all-LIS blog? (Carrie)
-Can we merge the wiki pages “Main Page Staff” and “Main Page Faculty”? (Carrie)
-Should we be calling ourselves “Middlebury Libraries” instead of “Middlebury College Libraries”? If so, do we need to change all references to “Middlebury College Libraries” including those in FirstSearch, etc? (Carrie)
-Can individual posts in the LIS blog display the search box for the whole blog? (Elin)
-Will links we enter now be broken when we go live? (Elin)
-Agenda for next Wed
Another item. We can weigh in here on the comments instead of taking up meeting time, if you like. Thanks!
LIS blog Comment approval
Back-story: Whenever I’m in the Admin area, I’ve been approving or marking as spam comments that need approval. But while I was away they piled up slightly (not a ton by any means–5 or 6). I’m happy to continue doing it but suspect it would make sense to officially hand someone on our team (or elsewhere within LIS) the responsibility. By the time I approve them, it looked like some of the legitimate comments in the queue were over 10 days old (some were from our own staff commenting from off-campus/not logged in, or individuals from other institutions asking good questions about posts, etc.) Maybe it would make sense for 2 people to check for pending approvals or twice a week?
I had no idea that comments needed approval! Do all comments made by people not logged in go through this? Is there much spam? Is this the way all Middlebury blogs work?
The settings for this blog are that comments are held in moderation unless the comment author is logged in and has a previously approved comment. Comments are also automatically held in moderation if they have a certain number of hyperlinks in them, to discourage spam. We can, of course, tweak these settings and have whatever comment approval process we like, however if you’ve been following some other Middlebury blogs, like the Web Redo blog, you’ll have recently noticed an uptick in the amount of comment spam.
I think the current approval settings are just fine, but would like to see everyone take on the responsibility for moderation. If you log on and there are some comments awaiting approval, take a minute and check them. If we need to have a couple of people who do this each day, that’s fine too. Thanks Jess for taking care of this recently.
Re: Should we be calling ourselves “Middlebury Libraries” instead of “Middlebury College Libraries”? Keep in mind we haven’t merged online resources. So Monterey (and language schools abroad) don’t have access to all our electronic databases & e-books and vice versa. I would keep Middlebury College Libraries to help make that distinction.
Also, not sure what you mean by listing all LIS blogs, but I recall that some in ACS don’t want that blog to go public because its where we record our activities for our boss and isn’t written with the public in mind.
I thought it was Middlebury College Library, not Middlebury College Libraries. Is the term Middlebury College Libraries the official name for the library or is it a label we created for the purposes of the web makeover to describe the Main library, branches, et al.? Just wondering if a name change like this is up to us or if it’s a higher-up thing.
Brenda,
I’m asking the team about listing all LIS blogs on your behalf–as I recall, you requested this–so when we get to this agenda item, I’ll specify that you’re not asking us to list private blogs. In fact, I doubt that the team will think it’s wise to list any LIS blogs since there are so many and they are so fluid (many are created, and some are not maintained).
Elin asks if “individual posts in the LIS blog [can] display the search box for the whole blog?”
Pages displaying individual posts can have the search box displayed on them. ShadowBox has options for “Single Post Display” that include “no sidebars,” “right sidebar” (the current setting for this blog), “left sidebar,” or “both sidebars.” Thus to show the search field on single post pages, an admin of this blog would need to change the “Single Post Display” to either “left sidebar,” or “both sidebars.”