Information Literacy Subcommittee Minutes

Present: Janet Brewer, Susan Brown, Jill Buckland, Anna Marie Johnson, Tom Kmetz, Steve Stone, Teri Weil, Emily Werrell, Haiwang Yuan

Not present: Edith Hansen, Louann Hardy, Rebecca Turner, Neata Wiley

We should find a Community College representative since Stacey Nickell is no longer part of the committee.

NEXT MEETING: February 11, 2000 Frankfort (although we discuss that E-Town or Bowling Green should be visited some day, and that compressed digital video has worked well for other committees) 1 p.m - 2 p.m. Haiwang will discuss how to create animated GIFs (like ) there are tutorials about lots of web stuff at

2 p.m - 4 p.m regular meeting

DEADLINES: Finish quizzes (and send to/tell Susan by Feb 11, 2000)
Emily has already sent out instructions on how to make pop-up boxes.

Also, go over the whole tutorial for typos, etc.

Start working on examples from real databases

Quick Budget report

The Information Literacy budget, which includes all training costs, was allocated $250,000 or so. Of that, about $40,000 has already been spent. It needs to be spent by June 30 (or earlier) or it will be re-allocated. New budget request for fiscal 2001 must be coming up, but I didn't get a date.

Fine Tuning Existing Content

Reminder of who has done what:

1. Web Basics - Steve and content on web searching added by Jill

2. Basic Searching - Janet (and originally Stacey) and newly added Anna Marie

3. Advanced Searching - Edith and Rebecca

4. Evaluating - Tom and Haiwang (and some from Emily)

5. Citing - Emily

We did decide that we should add specific examples to our sections where appropriate, and using library catalogs where possible (since they are open).

We need to improve the graphics and snazziness. Using animated gifs of screen shots should help.

Everyone should look for typos or any improvements as we go through the whole quiz.

As you re-visit your section, try to cut the length down, or break into additional sections.

Controlled vocabulary has been added, but some of the transitions still need work.

Finishing the Quizzes
In looking at quizzes, be sure to provide feedback on what is right and wrong and why.

We started using the quiz function so that instructors would have proof that students had gone through.

We should incorporate quizzes on each page where appropriate, and have a grand master quiz at the end that has all the questions from all the sections.

We can use pop-up answers like Jill has used in her quiz on web search engines. We discussed common color or not, but didn't reach a clear decision.

You have 3 options:

1) do the quizzes on the page yourself and tell Susan when you are done

2) do quizzes on the page yourself, and give Susan a different set of questions to use in the final master quiz

3) give Susan the questions you want to use on the page, and on the final master

Hiring an Consultant
We have wanted an instructional designer. How do we get one? What are we hoping the person would do?

The person might:

• make sure we are using good learning theory throughout
• be a graphic designer / suggest or create graphics
• be a web designer who can code stuff in for us

But, the thing that we most need is someone to do the first thing: to evaluate our pedagogy.

In the future, we might want consultants to help us create a video and/or audio and/or CD-ROM tour.

The question arose of who would use a video of how to use the web site. If they aren't comfortable enough using the web themselves, will a video help them get to that point? Some suggested yes, that the connectivity in many homes and some libraries is still poor, but VCR are much more available.

If I remember, Emily was going to work on updating the previous RFP (request for proposals).

Discussion: should we add WebZ content?

Anna Marie has some WebZ experience and could work on this.

FYI - we could link to live searches, it is possible.

Finally, we decided to re-visit the issue when WebZ gets more completed. Perhaps June 2000? Dec 2000?

Beth Kraemer of UK is the chair of the subcommittee that is working on writing the help for WebZ. We could offer to help or plan a joint meeting with those people.

Public Libraries are using WebZ.

Usability
What are people using? How are they using it? Susan was looking into statistics on use, which might give some info. Several people have taken the quiz, at least 40 pages of 30 people per page, so 1200 uses of the quiz, and perhaps 200 of those were testing the quizzes to see if they worked, so probably 1000 people have taken the quizzes.

Digression: should we stick with Eduprise?
We don't like customizing content for a platform that might not be supported in the future. We might look to using vanilla HTML, PDF and MS Word documents where appropriate, to ease future updating.

Infocourse is free and good, reports Haiwang. Tom demonstrated a product from Blackboard.com, courseinfo.

Dreamweaver, a HTML editor, instead of say, FrontPage is $99 and is the standard at WKU.

Digression: can redirect to EBSCO if you have security
If you have a security/login system already set-up on your campus, you can redirect people so they can use EBSCO without having to know a password.

Digression: Truncation
Susan gets that unit three says "four" sections, but it has 3 left, now that search engines has been moved, and will fit it.

Truncation is not consistent in WebZ. Asterisk works better than question mark, reports Teri.

submitted by Steve Stone 1/11/00

This page was last updated on January 11, 2000.

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