ACRL Distance Learning Section Web Committee Meeting Minutes 14 January 2001

Present: Jack Fritts (Chair), Kate Adams, Marissa Cachero, Nicole Campbell, Billie Peterson, Beth Reiten and Rebecca Sedam.

Absent: Rick Bean, Andrew Corrigan, Colleen Cuddy, April Purcell Levy, Srivalli Rao, and Patricia Wilson.

Visitors: Audrey Gorman, ALA, Director of Roads to Learning. Review of Minutes from meeting on July 9, 2000: Motion was made to approve the minutes by Beth Reiten and seconded by Rebecca Sedam. Minutes were approved.

Review/Correction of Roster: Corrections were made to the roster. Two people were dropped from the committee.

Liaison Activities: Jack asked liaisons to ask their committees to check their rosters, to determine what the Web Committee can do for them and to collect minutes to be posted on the site. Beth Reiten kept the Instruction Committee, Rebecca Sedam took the Electronic Resources committee, Billie Peterson took Program Planning 2001 and Program Planning 2002, Kate Adams took the Research committee, Marissa Cachero took the Statistics, Strategic Planning and Liaison committees, Nicole Campbell took Communications and Membership, and Jack Fritts took Guidelines.

Reports from the Committees:

• Instruction: The roster is okay. At some point, they will be interested in posting some research that they are looking into.
• Electronic Resources: They are working on updating their charge and they will check their roster. They will also look over the list of sites on the Resources web page to make sure links are working and they will also think about formatting issues so that the page can be printed out as a handout.
• Program Planning 2001: Chair will check the roster.
• Program Planning 2002: Once they are up and running, the chair will contact their liaison about posting program information on the web site.
• Research: They will submit minutes to their liaison and will review their charge for accuracy. They would like to post survey results and links to research aids and web sites. They are exploring the possibility of converting the Washington Library Association's research database submission form (http://www.uwec.edu/library/lrrt/resform.html) for use by DLS members as a way for sharing research ideas. They would like the Web Committee to maintain a database of the results from this form.
• Statistics: Will submit their minutes to their liaison. They agreed with removing the "under constructions" now on their portion of the site and they would like to post an announcement on upcoming ACRL Survey on Statistics and Trends.
• Liaison: Will submit their minutes to their liaison. In San Francisco, they will try to locate potential meeting where a DLS presence would good and will give us a list of those meetings.
• Strategic Planning: Will submit minutes to their liaison. They want to post drafts of the strategic plan, the mission statement, their environmental scan and the 5 year review, so they can solicit comments about these documents.
• Membership: They will submit their minutes to their liaison. There is one change to the roster that the chair will email to their liaison.
• Communications: The roster looks fine and they will submit their minutes. They suggested having a new message from the Chair as the current one is quite old. They also suggested making a web version of the DLS brochure available from the site (and they wonder who should be working on this?). They are exploring the ability to have clickable links in the pdf versions of the DLS Newsletter. (Does anyone know which version of software may do this?)

Discussion: Jack reported that at the DLS Executive Meeting at Midwinter, it was agreed to put a counter on the site, the process of committee memberships (appointments and removals) would be cleaned up, and that there should only be one web site for the organization.

Guest Audrey Gorman lead a discussion on accessibility issues for the DLS Web site and the Guidelines. She discussed a proposed ALA guideline for library services for people with disabilities and left handouts with Jack Fritts. Jack will send these on to everyone (if you do not receive these via email by January 26th, email Jack). Audrey also noted that Bobby (www.cast.org/bobby/) is a tool for testing base level accessibility of a web site and she commented that she is giving a program in San Francisco on accessible library workstations.

Beth Reiten displayed an updated DLS logo for comments. The group decided upon one that uses Arial for the text. Beth will make this logo available to Rebecca for adding to the site.

Jack Fritts noted that Nancy Burich (DLS Newsletter Editor) is working on converting old newsletters to pdf files so that they can be posted on the web site.

Submitted by: Nicole Campbell.

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