General Comments about Reserves

[Betty Ing]

Hi Graham/Art, when you have a moment, here they are:

1. The posted date of Welcome to a demo of Syrup! message is Sat Dec 12
22:40:29 2009. Why?
2. From the Django Admin screen, should we be able to return to the
home page?
3. Many screens could use a “Back” button that is part of the screen;
we are currently using the “Back” button from the browser.
4. There are some occurrences of “TemplateNotFound” when trying a
feature, e.g. Browse by Department. Which ones are errors, and which
one are still in development?

Betty

[Graham Fawcett]

Hi Betty,

Sorry to all for my sluggish responses. Art and I are meeting later
today to review the outstanding questions.

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Betty Ing <in...@mcmaster.ca> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Graham/Art, when you have a moment, here they are:
>
> 1. The posted date of Welcome to a demo of Syrup! message is Sat Dec 12
> 22:40:29 2009. Why?

Good eyes! That was a hack, to keep the Welcome message always-on-top.
News items are sorted by publication date, most recent shown first.

By default, the publication date is the date/time at which the news
item was added. But the editor may manually change the timestamp (as I
did).

> 2. From the Django Admin screen, should we be able to return to the
> home page?

I would argue that we should not. Django Admin is an interface of last
resort, and we should intentionally not work to make it more
user-friendly, IMHO. I would strongly steer anyone away from using the
Django Admin interface unless they have a very specific recipe for the
action they need to take. Whether such recipes belong in the formal
docs is an open question.

Also an open question is who, among the users, will have sufficient
privileges to even see the Django Admin link. To my way of thinking, a
select few would (systems librarians, reserves-desk managers) but most
staff would not. This decision will be made locally, and I'm not sure
how the documentation should read.

> 3. Many screens could use a “Back” button that is part of the screen;
> we are currently using the “Back” button from the browser.

Which screens for example?

> 4. There are some occurrences of “TemplateNotFound” when trying a
> feature, e.g. Browse by Department. Which ones are errors, and which
> one are still in development?

Any TemplateNotFound is an error, whether or not we know about it and
plan a fix (in the Department case).

I've just reconfigured the kessler1 demo site, so that when an error
occurs you will no longer see the familiar "yellow screen", but a more
Syrupy-looking (and still rather awful) error message. The upside is
that I'll now receive a detailed email whenever such an error occurs.
This way I'll know where you're encountering problems, and should be
able to address them more effectively.

Best, and thanks again,
Graham

[Betty Ing]

Hi Graham,

Thanks for these answers. I'm ok with Django Admin. being a last-resort
step, however we need to use it now to compensate for missing GUI
functionality. I think the Karen F. will be sending you info on that.
In the meantime, do I still need to be concerned about documenting
Django Admin?

Karen F. will also get back to you on the missing "Back" buttons.

If there is time today, perhaps you could also address Karen
Schneider's conerns:

"One thing I noticed right off the bat is that your documentation
plunges into describing the software function without explaining what
the system does. I bring this up because for reserve systems, it's
useful to know what kind of reserves they can handle: print,
electronic, licensed resources, etc., and how it can manage things
(e.g. by semester), whether course materials and/or semesters can be
recycled for future use, how old semesters are archived, etc. Not all
of that would go up front but certainly the basic info would be
useful."

Could you suggest some content for a preamble for Sytrup?

"I found adding resources and then sequencing them to be laborious, in
part because they don't go into a natural location (e.g.
chronological). Just felt like a lot of clicking, plus tasks to move
items are in two separate spots."

I also found that it was not intuitive.

Thanks for your input.

Betty

[Graham Fawcett]

Hi,

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 2:39 PM, Betty Ing <in...@mcmaster.ca> wrote:

> "I found adding resources and then sequencing them to be laborious, in
> part because they don't go into a natural location (e.g.
> chronological). Just felt like a lot of clicking, plus tasks to move
> items are in two separate spots."

Could you clarify? I'm not sure, but Karen seems to be suggesting that
items should automatically be ordered chronologically, perhaps (e.g.)
based on their dates of publication.

Would such a fixed ordering be superior to a customizable ordering?
Where would headings, which have no metadata, fall within such a
sequence? What if an instructor prefers a pedagogical ordering that
cannot be derived from the metadata?

> I also found that it was not intuitive.

Can you describe a more intuitive interface? Perhaps refer to another
application whose interface handles this kind of workflow better, and
we can consider borrowing from it.

Best,
Graham

[Betty Ing]

I don't have any reference application in mind, but I will forward your
comments to Karen S.

Thanks, Graham.