[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] ***SPAM*** on-screen help in 2.0 AND breaking down kinds of documentation

[Cheryl Gould]

Two related things in this message:

I'm working with King County on the Help screens that will be
implemented as On-Screen tab level help.  (At least that's the current
plan).  I'm hoping to get a group of DIG people together to run-by
some ideas of what should be on those help screens.  I've got a start
and want to be certain that others agree this would work for them.
Ideally, this on-screen help will get in the 2.0 release, I'm not sure
what ramifications this has for documentation so I wanted to mention
it to the group.  A few more details for those interested: the plan is
to have tab level help and a place to link out to local policies to
separate the issues of what the software does and what policies the
libraries have set since they are not the same from installation to
installation. It will probably use HTML so their should be easy ways
to link out of the help text.

This leads me to the second issue I'd like to bring up with this group.

I'm interested in having a discussion about how to handle needs of
different kinds of users.  Here's how I see the breakdown of types of
users who might want documentation.  These seem like separate groups
to me and I'm not clear so far on how this is being handled.

Kinds of Documentation
1. Developers
2. Server admin (for folks that install Evergreen and manage servers
and presumably migrate data)
4. System Admin (for people who set the policies in Evergreen.  These
people may also be the folks that decide policies but might only input
what they are told.)
5. System Admin (for folks who need to understand how flexible
Evergreen is and need to know what decisions are possible.  This could
include suggestions about who to include in the conversations so the
right people give input on decisions about how to set up Evergreen
initially. (Have I gone too far here in thinking this community should
get involved at this level?) This level of documentation would be for
supervisors who might not have much technical knowledge)

6.  End users in different categories  (on-screen help would change
their documentation) a.      Circ staff b.      OPAC from staff and
customers perspective? c.      Cataloging d.      Acquisitions e.
Reporting Any comments you have on the ways to separate documentation
would be appreciated.  In a lot of the documentation I've seen out
there, local policy is mixed with Evergreen usage and it seems like we
want to clearly create documentation that works for its audience and
can be replicated for the entire community.

Last: For those of you at the Evergreen conference who came to my
Getting There From Here session. I did the "Discovery Session" with 11
folks who had never used Evergreen and used exercises I showed during
the presentation.  All 11 people finished all exercises without any
instruction (we helped a few that got stuck, mostly around computer
competency issues like columns or right-clicking or validated
entries.) At the end of the session all learners said they felt
comfortable enough to go back and teach people they worked with which
wasn't even the goal.  And they thought it was easy.

Cheryl Gould
Learning Facilitator