Web Opac

Work is begun on examining the effects of Rel 2006 on the webpac. Nothing will change much until we go to Webpac Pro. Then we will need to work with the following:

• wwwoptions -- need to check on
• BRIEF=UR (can't find UR in documentation)
• When we go to briefcit.html and iterations, will BROWSE options become redundant?
  
• Besure to change WEBADDRESS to reflect WorldCat nearby
• "briefcit.html" and its iterations will need to be tweaked
• Ask iii to make us a "webpub.def" to emulate what we currently have and then we can tweak.

More as I think of them....

web colors

Note to myself:

Green #446666 is a really good color
Green #BBCCAA is a good accompanyment to that color.

Relevancy Ranking

From ALA TechSource - How OPACs Suck, Part 1
http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2006/03/how-opacs-suck-part-1-relevance-rank-or-the-lack-of-it.html

So How Do You Make Cream, Anyway?
Relevance ranking is actually fairly simple technology. It's primarily determined by the magic of something every search-engine vendor will talk your ears off about: TF/IDF.

TF, for term frequency, measures the importance of the term in the item you're retrieving, whether you're searching a full-text book in Google or a catalog record. The more the term million shows up in the document—think of a catalog record for the book Million Little Pieces—the more important the term million is to the document.

IDF, for inverse document frequency, measures the importance of the word in the database you're searching. The fewer times the term million shows up in the entire database, the more important, or unique, it is.

Put TF and IDF together—the importance of a term in a document, and the uniqueness of the same term in an entire database—and you have basic relevance ranking. If the word million shows up several times in a catalog record, and it's not that common in the database, the item should rise to the top, as Endeca presents them in the NCSU catalog.

Eric Reiss -- Web Dogma ‘06

As posted in the interview by Liz Danzico

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/dogmas_are_mean

1. Anything that exists only to satisfy the internal politics of the site owner must be eliminated.
   
2. Anything that exists only to satisfy the ego of the designer must be eliminated.
   
3. Anything that is irrelevant within the context of the page must be eliminated.
   
4. Any feature or technique that reduces the visitor’s ability to navigate freely must be reworked or eliminated.
   
5. Any interactive object that forces the visitor to guess its meaning must be reworked or eliminated.
   
6. No software, apart from the browser itself, must be required to get the site to work correctly.
   
7. Content must be readable first, printable second, downloadable third.
   
8. Usability must never be sacrificed for the sake of a style guide. ... etc.
   

Follow-up July 06

Despite a very busy summer, we must proceed with the follow up steps so that we can continue to provide a dynamic, useful website.

I've mapped out some steps to take in a continuation to the mindmap done previously. The maps have been converted to web pages and graphics to facilitate viewing. The "Follow-up" map links

• back to the original design map
• further to the text-only map
• that one links to a map about the text-only FAQs
  
• future link will be to the user survey
• Jon Luckstead is working on a preliminary draft

You can see the Follow-up mindmap at
http://insideirt.austincc.edu/library/Lweb/design06/FollowUp/