ILS rumblings

My spider senses have been well and truly tingled! Rumours are starting to circulate about another major ILS merger/acquisition.
I find it hard to believe that the current ILS marketplace could possibly support another one of these (after the Sirsi & Dynix and Ex Libris & Endeavor mergers) but, then again, I do like surprises 😀

OPAC Survey – Q2b – OPAC Age

Question 2 – Cutting Edge or Yesterday’s News
Q2b) If “2007” represents a cutting edge OPAC with all the features both you and your users would expect, how far in the past do you feel your current OPAC is?

mode response: 2005
number of respondents: 724

Although the most common response was 2005, the majority (56%) of respondents picked 2002 or earlier.

year vs number of respondents:

OPAC Survey – Q2a – Meeting User Needs and Expectations

Question 2 – Cutting Edge or Yesterday’s News
Q2a) On a scale of 1 to 10, how well do you think your OPAC meets the needs and expectations of your users?

average response out of 10: 4.56
mode response out of 10: 3
number of respondents: 727

More worrying than the average response, the most common response was just 3 out of 10!

response out of 10 vs number of respondents:

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OPAC Survey – Final Results

If you’ve come to this page via the CILIP Update article, please note that the published article should have been credited to “Dave Pattern, Lynn Stevens, and Lisa Balman”. The article was very much a collaborative effort by all three of us, and I’m deeply indebted to Lynn and Lisa for their help.
I suspect the error in attribution was a genuine oversight by the hardworking staff at Update, and hopefully they’ll be able to include an erratum in the next edition.
OPAC Survey – Final Results
After releasing a large chunk of the results in May and June, I did promise to put together a full report of the findings. Unfortunately, as so often happens, life (and work) got in the way.
So, I’ve decided to try and make things easier for myself by releasing the results for each question separately as individual blog posts (partly inspired by how Meredith Farkas handled the recent “Survey of the Biblioblogosphere”).
This blog post will act as a growing index of links, so you might want to bookmark it!
Links (this section will grow)

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Library Refurbishment

The entrance floor of the University of Huddersfield Library has been closed all summer for a major refurbishment. Today, we opened the doors to the “Student Centre” (the new name for the entrance floor) in time for Welcome Weekend and the start of Fresher’s Week.
Apart from the refurbishment, the new Student Centre hosts service points for the various Student Services which were previously housed elsewhere in the Central Services Building. This is great news for our students, as the majority of the services they require to support them during their studies are now in one place.
Even more exciting (for me, anyway!) — we get delivery of our new RFID book sorter on Monday morning 🙂
You can see all of the images from this morning in this Flickr set (or as a slideshow). Here are some of my favourites…

ww_044 ww_043 ww_039 ww_034 ww_022 ww_019 ww_003 ww_002

We’ve even managed to tweak our OPACs so that the screensaver matches the new colour scheme 🙂

ww_033

Hitchcock blog

When I started this blog in 2005, it was primarily to support the Hitchcock site, which started up in 2003. The title of the blog (“Self-plagiarism is style”) being a quote from Hitchcock.
Two years on, the most popular posts seem to be those about libraries so I’ve decided to fork the blog — this one will continue to be library and personal posts, and a new blog will concentrate on the Hitchcock stuff: “It’s Only a Movie…”

NAG 2007 Conference workshop

I think I’ve just about recovered from my first NAG Conference, which was held this year at Keele University…
Ronald Milne takes a question from Ken Chad
A big “thank you” to everyone who came along to the “Web 2.0 – It’s Okay to Play” workshops and I hope it sparked one or two ideas that you might want to pursue!
100_8540 100_8980
Some of the photos I took are now on Flickr (I’ve used the tag “nag2007”).
The presentation is available to view or download at SlideShare: www.slideshare.net/daveyp/n-a-g2007
As promised, here’s those links for you to explore…
Continue reading “NAG 2007 Conference workshop”