Committee meeting notes
Date: July 21, 2011
Attendees:
Chris Francis, Eva Grabinski (Chair), Nancy Heide , Ryan King , Joanna Magee , Kelley Teahen
Discussions related to scope or goal of the group
- The target for the end product should be content editors and maintainers.
- The scope doesn't apply to the full Web Content Stewardship report.
- Enforcement of a policy will be virtually impossible, so a guideline should be produced.
- Certain more sensitive information is a much larger concern. The main ones potentially should be specifically identified in the end product. Dates, prices and policies were noted as part of this discussion. The deciding factor would be the consequence of the information being inaccurate. An inaccurate research story and an inaccurate submission date were seen as having quite different consequences.
- Suggested that the final product be divided into a "Must do" section and a "Best Practices" section.
- Website owners (Departments, groups, support units, ...) don't necessarily have full time web developers able to keep up on best practices. A quick reference sheet they could keep hand would help ensure they adopt our recommendation. The social media policy was mentioned as a similar concept. Keeping this to one page was discussed.
- Should there be an appendix of tips/tricks?
- Should there be a glossary of terms? There was some worry about extra lingo being forced on the end user.
Discussions related to the background of the project
- There has been a general concern across campus about how content is shared. There has been a Web Content Stewardship (PDF)report generated, but its target audience isn't editors and maintainers. The scope of this group falls on a single section of that report.
- There was a legal case due to the recruitment and registrar sites at a university (in Montreal?) having different dates.
- An Information Architect will be responsible coordinating the Metadata efforts portion of the Web Content Stewardship policy.
Discussions on content reuse
- Blocks of content become much easier to share with the implementation of a Content Management System (CMS). This doesn't mean that they should be freely between different sections of the University.
- Single sources for data benefit users by ensuring consistent data for the user.
- Many things came up regarding the guideline on linking items. Users have become much more comfortable in following links, including to external sites. From an accessibility perspective, it is better to link in the same window, instead of opening into a new window/tab. Avoiding repetition is easier with linking. Does one actually need the content on their site?
- Waterloo content can be shared without copyright implication. That may not apply to images, but for the most part should. Despite this, the content owner should be worked with when republishing content.
- Content from outside sources must be linked as copyrights do apply. News agencies were identified as a likely source. Summarizing and linking is an option.
- Quoting and Summarizing content. Should anything ever be copied and pasted? Quoting a specific part of a long policy caused some concern. Is having the small section and linking to the full policy acceptable? If so, should any content like that be dated? Does this vary between summarizing and directly quoting or copying?
- Things like the campus map were identified as something that should always be linked to due to its update frequency. This let to concerns about using portions of the map to identify specific locations. There were different thoughts if it was a more prominent thing like a retail store compared with an office for someone.
- Changing voice/retargeting content. Effective marketing at points will require rewriting for the audience. How should this be handled in terms of who does the rewrite? Can the person wanting the rewritten content do so and use it. If so, what sort of approvals should be involved? What happens when other groups want to use the rewritten content instead of the original? The approval of the content owner will help ensure that content isn't misinterpreted.
CMS related topics
The CMS won't be an all-encompassing solution to ensure content sharing happens perfectly.
What can be leveraged from the CMS system?
Stale content was a concern. Can the CMS provide notices to review content after a timeframe? By Semester? Yearly?
Examples
- Marketing & Undergraduate Recruitment (MUR) and Housing example stressing the importance of the contact information relation to data ownership. See 4.a.i. in the agenda.
- Content may be encouraged to be shared. The Engineering annual report was identified as an example.
- Individual research awards on the OR site will have information from many places compiled into a single page. This includes information from the sponsor’s site. When that sponsor’s site changes, there is no control identifying the need to update the OR webpage.
Actions and considerations
What content do we use now?
What are our current linking practices?
What is working well for our sites? What isn't?
We should identify specific examples that apply to each of us. With the distribution of the group we will hopefully capture most of the important scenarios.