Kentucky Virtual Library Advisory Committee Minutes
April 2, 2004
Frankfort, KY
Present: Arne Almquist, Cherry Berges, Diane Culbertson, Charlene Davis [for Jim Nelson], Laura Davison [for Bill Hansen], Carol Diedrichs, Norma Northern, Lisa Rice, Blenda Fields, Janet Stith, Enid Wohlstein
Also Present: Michael Providenti
Absent: Joyce Bullock, Chela Kaplan, Jim Nelson, Hannelore Rader, Cathy Reilender, Dennis Taulbee, Lee Van Orsdel
1. Approval of Minutes
The minutes of 20 February were approved as distributed.
2. VLAC Members’ Updates
Diane will give four presentations this summer highlighting KYVL and the Kids’ Portal.
Blenda announced the rollout of the new ADA-compliant, HTML version of the Kids’ Portal which occurred 1 April.
Lisa talked about “Libraries Go 4th” which is an effort at Bowling Green Public Library where staff go to 4th grader classrooms to teach them about the Kids’ Portal and the BG Public website.
The Southern Kentucky Book Fest will take place this month in Bowling Green through a partnership of the Western Kentucky University Libraries, Barnes & Noble Booksellers and Bowling Green Public Library.
Lisa also mentioned “One Campus-One Community-One Book” sponsored by the Southern Kentucky Book Fest partners. The book chosen: “Coiled in the Heart” by Kentucky author, Scott Elliott. The project was launched in January and culminated with discussions and a visit by the author in March. Information can be found at http://www.bgonebook.org
Arne announced the “Breaking Down Barriers” Conference, co-sponsored by the Kentucky Higher Education Computing Conference (KHECC), Connected Learning in Kentucky (CLiK) and the State Assisted Academic Library Council of Kentucky (SAALCK). The conference will take place 30 September and 1 October and will be hosted at NKU. Call for papers will be announced soon.
SAALCK will also bring the first Kentucky LAMA Regional Institute in August. The topic of the full-day workshop on “21st Century Organizational Effectiveness.” Administrators and managers from libraries of all types and sizes are invited to attend.
Charlene announced the Kentucky SOLINET Users’ Group (KSUG) and Virtual Library Users’ Group (VLUG) combined meeting would take place on 21 May, at the Erlanger branch of the Kenton County Public Library.
Cherry reported on the consolidation of Madisonville technical and community colleges. A survey of technical program faculty is in progress.
Laura announced a VLUG Officers’ meeting would take place at Spring KLA. VLUG will also be sponsoring a soirée at Fall KLA.
3. KYVU Update (Northern)
Pre-registration for Fall 2004 and Spring 2005 will open April 1st.
Norma announced that KYVL is now a seamless connection within the Angel course management system. A KYVL link is in the Angel portal. No second login is required to access the databases.
St. Catherine is now a four-year institution. There is discussion of placing their allied health courses online with KYVU. Midway will continue to offer courses via KYVU.
Norma discussed the costs for access to Angel and WebCT.
The state budget has been approved in the Senate and will now be reviewed in the House.
4. KYVL Update (Wohlstein)
ADA (Michael Providenti, chair):
The ADA Work Group met on 26 March 2004. At this meeting the work toward the ADA compliant Kid's Portal was demonstrated, the accessibility statement was discussed, the templates and style sheets for the main site were viewed, and standards-based syntax for the site was explained. There was a brief discussion about the accessibility standards and laws and how they relate. ADA, Section 504, Section 508, and the KRS were put in the context of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines' 3 Priorities.
Kids’ Portal: The revised Kids’ Portal is text/html page that uses style sheets to mimic the behavior of the original flash site. The embedded sounds of the flash site are not duplicated. The original flash site remains available but it will no longer be the default version of the site.
Accessibility Statement: A draft accessibility statement has been prepared but will need to be modified to accommodate a phased release of the revised KYVL site. The statement as written assumes a completed ADA compliant site. Since portions of the site will be brought online in sequence, the
modification will address a mechanism to have portions of the site not yet revised to be made accessible upon request. As Macromedia (developer of Flash) and Adobe (developer of Acrobat) are taking accessibility concerns seriously, a section of the statement will address the use of these technologies.
Site Templates: Tentative templates have been developed for the main portion of the KYVL site. While minor modifications are needed, these templates demonstrate logical document structure and a series of style sheets. These templates will produce an initial layout very similar to the current site. Style sheets will streamline any future redesign. Syntax for various features was explained. Standardizing the syntax for access keys, translated text, etc. is necessary to ensure accessibility features are consistent across the site.
The new html version of the Kids’ Portal was launched yesterday, 1 April.
Endeavor (Tari Keller, chair):
The group met on 5 March.
1. Both hub servers are now in sync with their patches. We don't have the latest patch loaded, but we aren't sure we need it at this time.
2. We are hoping to put our production databases through a test UNICODE release upgrade, using the test server. The UNICODE release should be available by this summer. This particular release involves major data massaging. If we do dry runs on the test server, we can generate reports that staff can use to clean the databases up before the actual upgrades which are planned for Summer 2005. This will make that upgrade less traumatic and let us couple the UNICODE release upgrade with the release due out next summer. We will get Oracle and AIX upgrades next summer as well.
3. We spent Tuesday and Wednesday of this week doing response-time testing on our databases. Not all of the libraries were able to do the tests at all four of the scheduled times. This was not an exercise that
could be finished in a few minutes! I am still waiting for data from some of the libraries. I think it was a good first effort. I am trying to figure out how to compile the data for sharing. We will discuss how
we can improve the process for next time. Most searches came back in 3 seconds or less. There were some exceptions. I plan to share the data with the systems librarians first. I am hoping they will have
suggestions for improving on the format.
We thank you for your continued support of our work.
Government Information Access (McAninch, chair):
The group met on 2 March. The membership of the group has changed very little but we did recently add an AICKU representative. The meeting was more of a meet and greet but we did take a look at the KYVL site and government information and links listed, as well as discussed other projects as they relate to repositories in the state.
We will be having a KYVL GovDocs Workshop in 1 November. We will start planning now and get commitment from speakers and then we can actually pick a day. We believe this would be marvelously beneficial to librarians and staff in the state, and our library science students.
KYVL staff will add a new category to the VRD for "Government"; it will contain all of the general federal and state government sites currently included in the "General Reference" category; subject-based links to federal and state government sites will stay where they are in the VRD. We will also add a link to “KyStats” within the new “Government” section to ensure that it is not overlooked.
Information Literacy (Anna Marie Johnson, chair):
No news since last meeting.
Outreach (Cindy Gaffney, chair):
The workgroup will be meeting next on 13 April.
Volunteers from the workgroup will be making a presentation at the KLA Public Library Section meeting on 7 May in Lexington. The presentation will cover the basics of what KYVL is and what we do, as well as discuss the right way to link to KYVL, how to present KYVL to patrons, and showing some examples. We are discussing distributing cd’s to attendees containing various instructional materials, KYVL logos, How To guides, etc. At the next meeting, the group will discuss the presentation format, finalizing content and presenters.
The workgroup met 1 April to review the responses received to the Request for Information (RFI). We will invite vendors to make presentations based on our analysis of the responses. The RFI responses and presentations will be used for the creation of an RFP.
We have tentatively scheduled 10, 12 and 14 May for the vendor presentations. These dates are tentative. When we have finalized dates and times, we will invite every library director to attend along with his or her technical support staff, as desired.
Resource Sharing (Barb Hale, chair):
No news since last meeting.
KYVAE is now a separate user community with its own id/password. We announced this to the AE community in late February.
All of our user communities also have the id/pw to distribute to folks who want to use KYVL databases at home or in locations where it's not accessible via a network . Because of our contracts with our database vendors, we have to be able to restrict access to just Kentucky people. Libraries, schools, universities, etc. have access onsite without an id/password.
For AE, we understand that most of the AE locations are on networks that we already have in our system and therefore, when in a center, more than likely someone can get right into the databases without having to login.
All users logging into the Angel portal from KYVU, KYVAE, KYVU4K12 and KyEducators now have access to the databases of Kentucky Virtual Library from within the portal.
When a user enters the Kentucky Virtual eLearning Portal, he/she will see a link for Kentucky Virtual Library under My Services.
The KYVL link will take the user directly to the databases search page. The user can choose to search in a subject area or to go directly to the native interface of a particular vendor, like EBSCO, or product, like Novelist.
* For educators and creators of courses, some of the databases offered by KYVL have a special web address, called a Persistent URL, which can be put into courses to direct learners to a specific article instead of just providing a citation.
We’ve had calls recently from the California Virtual Campus (CVC) and Partnership Among South Carolina Academic Libraries (PASCAL) to discuss the KYVL model. CVC is interested in KYVU and the KYVL resources and relationships. We will be speaking with the directors of both groups in the next week.
KYVL will have a booth at this event on 13 July. We might potentially be presenting as well. We’ll have KYVL materials at the booth and also materials from our vendors to distribute.
Tanzi has been on the road recently in March and will be out again to conduct training in April. She has already been in Louisville, Lexington and Morehead. The sessions are 9am to 4:30pm covering KYVL databases and other resources.
Upcoming dates/locations:
6 April – Pikeville
7 April – Jackson
8 April – Barbourville
5. KYVU’s Angel Course Management System (Wohlstein)
Enid gave an overview of the Angel course management system and the various features. She also demonstrated the link the KYVL.
6. KYVL’s ADA Efforts (Providenti)
Michael Providenti spoke about KYVL’s ADA Workgroup and ADA-compliant web design. He gave a tour of the new ADA-compliant, html version of the KYVL Kids’ portal.