OPAC Survey results – part 5

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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5 thoughts on “OPAC Survey results – part 5”

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

  2. 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. 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. 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!

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