2016-10-04 Meeting notes

• Did some initial discussion about items in the Letters areas of CSU wide policies and or best practices.  An Oct. 14 deadline looms so we will have a second meeting on Oct. 10 to determine what to forward.
• What difficulties would we face in standardizing letters throughout the CSU's?  What benefits would be derived from doing this? Which letters do we all use?  Should we focus on those being sent externally, be it patrons or vendors, etc.?
• Would it be more sensible approach to create best practices.  Possibly in the areas of design and layout, standard set of information/language/terminology based on type of letter, branding/logos.
• Some agreement about creating templates and the need to be able to share them among the campuses.
• Action Items emerged for reviewing templates and letters area further. Action item listed below.
• Timeline:

  Oct 12, send first drafts

  Nov 11, All policy drafts sent out for comments, feedback from working group

  Dec 09, Final policy drafts

  
  
  

• An agenda was provided which pulled out some components of what we would need to complete the Alma Letters / XSLT (Joint Access Services - Systems Task Force) project plan page. 
• Info has been added to Project Plan for further review/refinement at next meeting.

The discussion was fairly fluid but some points picked up for possible Best Practices recommendations.

• Setting up letters. What is involved in working with letters? Letter setup may be different in single library vs multiple library campuses where replies to letters are handled by the originating library/entity. This impacts whether the From: email account is a 'no-reply' versus active account.
• Letter design. Content should fit departments needs, however these are official communications. Some skill and expertise in use of XML, XSL, CSS may serve each library well for look and feel, proportionality, use of white space, mobile device considerations.
• Tools.  For letter testing, Alma has testing environment that needs some setup.  For letter editing, external enhanced text editors will be needed, suchas Text Wrangler, Oxygen, etc. Should we recommend editing apps?
• Training.  Is training within the scope or out of scope for this project?

• Discussed what features related to Letters are in the network zone and how this may or may not assist in standardizing or at minimum sharing letter templates among the CSUs.
• Action item below to receive more background information.