"Self-plagiarism is style"

OPAC Survey results - part 5

15th April 2007

OPAC Survey results - part 5

posted in opac survey |

Some more graphs — this time, further breakdowns of "feature importance"…

1) Academic v Public

opacgraph011

2) Australian Respondents

opacgraph012

3) Canadian Respondents

opacgraph013

4) New Zealand Respondents

opacgraph014

5) UK Respondents

opacgraph015

6) American Respondents

opacgraph016

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 5:03 pm and is filed under opac survey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 5 responses to “OPAC Survey results - part 5”

Why not let us know what you think by adding your own comment! Your opinion is as valid as anyone elses, so come on... let us know what you think.

  1. 1 On April 17th, 2007, Ian said:

    I wonder why the UK seems so unenthusiastic about new features? Is it lack of motivation, lack of funding, or just cynicism?

    posted on April 17th, 2007 at 1:01 pm

  2. 2 On April 17th, 2007, Dave Pattern said:

    One of my colleagues (Lisa) is busy going through the respondent comments with a fine toothcomb and she mentioned that many of the UK comments are more dismissive or more cynical when it comes to the value of the more "2.0" features.

    In the most recent set of graphs, I spotted that the Talis customers buck the UK trend:

    Feature Importance (Talis v UK average)

    posted on April 17th, 2007 at 1:49 pm

  3. 3 On April 18th, 2007, Laurie said:

    I am very surprised at the relative low level of enthusiasm expressed by academic librarians for the web 2.0 features given all the hype in the literature about them. OTOH, the hype I see has come mostly from the literature related to library instruction, so perhaps if the same questions were asked of instruction/reference librarians we'd see different results.

    posted on April 18th, 2007 at 5:30 pm

  4. 4 On April 18th, 2007, Dave Pattern said:

    I seem to remember quite a few of the comments from the academic library respondents said that they didn't feel that the "read/write OPAC" features (tagging, comments, ratings, etc) were relevant to the academic environment and would be more suited to public libraries.

    I suspect there's also a concern about how some of these features might be "dumbing down" the OPAC and turning into a kind of Amazon clone.

    In many ways, it boils down to what the role of the OPAC should be — is it simply an inventory system for keeping track of the stock, or is it something that encourages serendipity and exploration? As you can probably guess, I believe it's the latter.

    We do have features in the OPAC that show things like the lending statistics for each item, but they only appear if you're using a staff PC (i.e. it's controlled by IP address).

    So, if I never see another OPAC with links to the MARC record for each item, I'll die a happy man!

    posted on April 18th, 2007 at 10:13 pm

  5. 5 On April 20th, 2007, Information Takes Over » Blog Archive » What happened at the Library 2.0 forum? said:

    [...] Part 5, the importance of features to academic and public is interesting.  Public libraries are [...]

    posted on April 20th, 2007 at 4:25 pm

Leave a Reply