Please take a moment to look at the latest project report from our
Guidelines Committee. Remember, this will affect you, so let your voice be
heard if you have any concerns. You can contact Teresa directly or myself.
Jan Cortez
Guidelines Committee
Permission to forward where appropriate is granted.
GUIDELINES COMMITTEE WEEKLY REPORT, for the week ending June 8 2002
===
On June 2 the weekly report was submitted to the Project. Two comments
were received. One recommended adding a requirement that LCs keep their
contact information updated with their State Coordinator; this comment was
discussed by the committee. The other comment was a generally positive
response to the recent discussion of page design issues.
-
Contact Information: The Committee is currently discussing adding a
requirement that Local Coordinators keep their contact address updated
with
their State Coordinator. The Contact section of the proposed
guidelines
would be reworded as follows: "Local Coordinators are required to provide
a
valid email address on their websites so that visitors may contact
them if
they need to do so. Local Coordinators are also required to notify their
state coordinators if their email address changes."
-
Page Design: The Committee has approved the following wording regarding
page design:
"You are free to add music, animations, java applets, graphics, etc. to
your pages, but you should try to keep your page design simple for the
benefit of visitors with older computers, dial-up connections, or
accessibility-related issues. Visitors should be able to turn off or
bypass any features that they have difficulty with. USGenWeb has a page
of
some useful design tips to help you get started at
<
http://www.usgenweb.com/volunteers/htmlhelp.html>."
-
Source Data: The Committee continues to discuss the recommendation that
LCs
provide transcriptions of source data on their webpages. The
Committee
was
in favor of both recommending that LCs provide a place for the
storage of
transcribed source data on their local website and that LCs transcribe
original source data if possible. The Committee recognizes that
circumstance may limit the ability of LCs to do either or both of these,
so
they will be in the guidelines as recommendations and not
requirements. The Committee was not in favor of recommending that LCs
direct submitters of transcribed data to the USGenWeb Archives (TM).
===
The current version of the working document is posted
at:
http://www.radix.net/~merope/lcguide.txt
Please address comments to Teresa Lindquist <merope(a)radix.net>
-Teresa Lindquist
Chair, Guidelines Committee
Representative At Large, USGenWeb Project
merope(a)radix.net