Part way through the survey, I added an optional question to allow respondents to specify which ILS product they use.
Here’s the breakdown of average responses to the following questions (which all asked the respondents to give a rating out of 10)…
1) easy for you — how easy do you (i.e. the respondent) find your OPAC is to use
2) easy for user — how easy do you think an average user/patron finds your OPAC is to use
3) meets user needs — how well do you think your OPAC meets the needs and expectations of your users
4) your happiness — how happy overall are you with your OPAC
By Product
Quite a few respondents simply listed their vendor (e.g. “SirsiDynix” or “Ex Libris”), so the above two graphs only use data from the responses where the actual system was named. As the Dynix ILS and Horizon use the same OPAC (HIP), I’ve grouped their responses together.
By Vendor
The above two graphs use more raw data (a total of 154 respondents, including the responses where only the vendor was named). As most of you will know, Ex Libris and SirsiDynix support more than one OPAC product.
Comments
I’m not sure that any one system or vendor comes out smelling of roses (or stinking of horse manure!), and I certainly wouldn’t suggest you base your next ILS choice on the results, but here’s a few comments…
1) ease of use for the respondent
Innovative and their Millenium product are the clear winners here, with nearly a gap of 0.99 between them and last place Voyager. Overall, the Ex Libris products get the lowest ratings.
2) ease of use for users/patrons
The Dynix/Horizon OPAC wins by a nose, with a noticeable gap between last place Voyager and the others.
3) meets the needs and expectations of users/patrons
Again, the Dynix/Horizon OPAC wins, with the other SirsiDynix OPAC (Unicorn) coming in second. Once again, Voyager comes last of the five.
4) overall happiness
For the third time, the Dynix/Horizon OPAC wins, with the two Ex Libris products coming last.
3 thoughts on “OPAC Survey results – part 6”
Comments are closed.
It would be good to somehow break down the feature expectations (how important features are) by vendor as well.
To declare an interest, we use several Ex Libris products, and I’m suprised that they get such a bad rating here – although they are far from perfect, if you compare the Aleph OPAC to the Millenium OPAC I think they are pretty comparable products.
Based on my own subjective point of view, I wonder if Ex Libris users might be more demanding, and rate the importance of yet to be delivered features differently to those of other vendors.
Also, in terms of meeting the needs of users, there is no doubt that I would expect many of the future gazing features to be more important in the Academic library world than in the Public library world – so again, it would be interesting to see this broken down in slightly different ways – are the Public library implementations of each system happier or less happy than the academic library ones etc.
Of course, all this is only because the results challenge my subjective beliefs – but I’d be interested in seeing more data to try to work out if I’m just way off here, or if there are more layers to this hidden in the detail.
No problem Owen — I’ll get digging through the data!
I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t include the questions about library type and library system from the start, as it would have been great to know which system each respondent was using.
To be honest, I guess I really didn’t expect to get more than about 30 responses, so I didn’t envisage there being enough raw data to make meaningful conclusions abouts systems and library types.