[Devforum] 8/20 Meeting Summary

[Karen Reardon]

Developer's Forum Monthly Meeting 
Minutes
Friday August 20, 2004

Attending:
Rick Zwies
Jennifer Weintraub
Julie Linden
George Ouellette
Brian Kupiec
Karen Reardon

A small group but we enjoyed a lively and informative discussion. Thanks 
to those who sent comments and suggestions, as they could not attend. 
Hopefully attendance will rise in September when summer vacations are a 
memory.  Those who attended, please send on anything you think I may have 
not captured.

Members were asked to bring one or two topics they'd like to see covered 
in the presentations and also a topic they might be dealing with / trying 
to solve right now, or something they believe should be focused upon.

Suggestions about items to be covered in presentations (if appropriate):
	Platforms chosen and why
	Workflow issues (especially relating to digitization processes)
	Interface design issues
	The planning process - how do you decide what is the 'goal' and 
how do user needs inform what you are doing and why
	Metadata schema chosen and why
	How is it determined who will catalog/index the records?
	How/Is the time it takes to catalog a record tracked?
	How do you get staff time to devote to a project? (What's not 
getting done if a digitization project is begun?)
	How do you determine what collections to digitize?
	How can you automate processes with scripts, etc?
	Is the CAS integrated into your processes, if so how?
	How is your project publicized? Especially to users outside of 
Yale.
	Platform issues - what technology used, who set it up, how is it 
maintained, how is that budgeted for?

Struggles / Items to be considered / New technologies to investigate:

	Color scanning / Standards (Note: Folks from the Art Gallery have 
offered to do a presentation on their new color digitization processes 
sometime in Nov/Dec so watch for that announcement.)
	Text Markup - TEI - How/where does this fit?
	Working with brittle materials that may need to be hand-placed or 
debound - how are folks dealing with these types of materials?
	Dealing with standards - what do you do when you settle on a 
standard but then it doesn't fit - how do you influence standards? 
(Specific question posed in relation to a standard for numeric data.)
	.net - what will it bring us?
	Web Services - What can they do for us and how can we best utilize 
and integrate this technology? (Note: See timely forwarded message from 
Meg Bellinger about Web Services and Endeavor.)

Next meeting is Friday, September 24 at 10:00 in SML 409 (Note location 
change from Lecture Hall).

It was suggested that Rick Zwies and I give an update on work we 
separately are doing to incorporate data into websites using XML / RSS 
feeds - so that will be an agenda item.

Questions / Comments / Suggestions - send them on. Thanks.

-Karen M. Reardon