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OPAC Survey results – part 5

Apr 15th, 2007
by Dave Pattern.

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

1) Academic v Public

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2) Australian Respondents

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3) Canadian Respondents

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4) New Zealand Respondents

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5) UK Respondents

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6) American Respondents

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Posted in: OPAC Survey.

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5 Comments

  1. Ian says:
    April 17, 2007 at 1:01 pm

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

  2. Dave Pattern says:
    April 17, 2007 at 1:49 pm

    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)

  3. Laurie says:
    April 18, 2007 at 5:30 pm

    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.

  4. Dave Pattern says:
    April 18, 2007 at 10:13 pm

    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!

  5. Information Takes Over » Blog Archive » What happened at the Library 2.0 forum? says:
    April 20, 2007 at 4:25 pm

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

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