Minutes - July 10, 2007
Present - Kate Yonezawa, Michael Baird, Hannah Rempel (notes), Cindy Skinner; Team 200 - Susan McEvoy, Margaret Mellinger, Anne-Marie Deitering
(Team 200 folks - we met a little after you left, so feel free to ignore that part)
Drupal for RDM - We met with Team 200 in order to discuss whether or not Drupal is an appropriate platform for the new RDM. They agreed that it was, and that it would be advantageous to use Drupal since some of the information that lives in the RDM can be re-purposed other places, because it can be used as a guinea pig that doesn't have a very public face, and because modules exist in Drupal to achieve much of what we want to with the new RDM. We talked specifically about the data structure of the current RDM and how well that will migrate over into Drupal. We will need to contact Terry Reese to get a map of the database tables of the current RDM in order to go ahead with planning the migration. However, since the tables should be in php, they should migrate over fine.
We discussed the best way to set up fields for the information we want to put in Drupal. We will probably need to migrate the information over first and then rearrange the data into any new fields that we come up with. To get the most mileage out of Drupal, we should evaluate the fields that are in the current version of RDM and then choose new, semantically-based field identifiers. Team 200 can help us with identifying the best way to do this.
Another thing to watch for while migrating the information over will be what additional information can be re-purposed in other ways across the website.
There shouldn't be any limitations in setting up a submission form, maintenance fields, or community features.
Team 200 will try to keep ease-of-editing in mind as they structure the editing layout in tools. For example, Susan thought that editing the most frequently edited spots for particular users would make accessing areas that needed to be edited easier.
We discussed log-in options. Everyone logs into Drupal with their onid ID. It would be useful to identify students vs. staff/faculty for log-in purposes so that student edits could be sent to the administrator for review before being posted. We would like logging in and out to remain as easy as possible so that people don't feel like using and editing the site are a burden.
Flippy thing - We discussed using a desktop calendar size FT, but currently disregarded in favor of looking for another way to set up the FT in a letter-size format at the desk. Hannah and Kate will look at the reference desk and see what might make sense.
Emergency Binder - Michael is creating a template for how the pages will be organized before he passed anything formatting duties to students. He will email the group when he runs into tricky overlap decisions.
Actions -
Hannah will contact Terry for the database mapping.
Susan will set up a wiki spot for the Reference Desk Communication tool area in confluence so that Team 200 and our task force can communicate about the Drupal/RDM migration.
Hannah and Kate will look at FT formatting and placement options.
Michael will continue working on the emergency binder formatting/weeding.