Dave Pattern's Blog
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:
Continue reading “OPAC Survey – Q2a – Meeting User Needs and Expectations”
Question 1 – OPAC Happiness
Q1a) On a scale of 1 to 10 (where 1 is extremely unhappy and 10 is extremely happy), how happy are you with your OPAC?
average response out of 10: 5.18
mode response out of 10: 7
number of respondents: 729
response out of 10 vs number of respondents:
Continue reading “OPAC Survey – Q1 – Overall Happiness”
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)
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…
We’ve even managed to tweak our OPACs so that the screensaver matches the new colour scheme 🙂
I noticed that a few other people have been blogging about how they’re using Twitter within their own library, so here’s how I’ve been (ab)using my Twitter feed…
http://twitter.com/daveyp
Last year, I set up some data feeds from the library that our students could hook into for their projects. This data includes a file listing the keywords used in the last 50 searches on the OPAC and their frequency.
The file is also used to generate this keyword cloud (which ignores words with a frequency of only 1).
Anyway, after getting bored with manually updating Twitter myself, I decided to hook it into the keyword file. Every few minutes, an automated script checks the file for the most frequently used keyword(s) from recent searches, and sends it off to Twitter.
I’m not sure if it really serves any useful purpose, but it’s kinda fun to see a top-slice of what our users are searching for. Occasionally the keywords link together to make weird statements…
…so, the next time Twitter crashes, you can probably blame me 😀
I’m doing a short presentation at an event in Wolverhampton in October (“Inspiring the iGeneration – Web 2.0, teenagers and libraries”) and I’m on the hunt for fun examples of how libraries (especially public libraries) are using “2.0” to attract teenagers.
I’ve got a few examples, but I’d love to hear about things you’re doing at your own library (e.g. gaming evenings, web content creation, etc) or things that you know other libraries have done. Even if it’s not really “2.0”, but it’s worked well in getting those teenagers in, then again I’d like to hear about it. I’m also really struggling to find examples in the UK, so if you know of anything, please let me know!
There’s been quite a bit of negative discussion recently about teenagers and computers in libraries (e.g. they use them to play games rather than to do their homework, or spend all their time on MySpace/Facebook/etc). I’d be interested to hear your comments about the subject (either negative or positive).
…sorry, but that was the best blog title I could come up with at 10pm after a long day 😉
In a previous post, I mentioned that the circulation figures were up for the year so far (when compared to 2006). That got me wondering what the long term trend was for items checked out. Unfortunately there are some sizeable gaps in the historical data (as stored on Horizon), otherwise I’d be able to go back as far as 1996.
Anyway, here’s how the number of check outs per month pans out since 2000…
…or if you prefer your lines to be smoother…
The CKO data for this year is in white.
There’s a marked change after 2002 in the period around May, and (if memory serves me right) the structure of our academic year changed in September 2002. The overall figures indicate that we had a slight decline around 2003, but it’s been climbing gradually since then. So, much as I’d love to take the glory for our increased CKOs this year, it’s probably just following the recent trend.
Finally, here’s the same graph, but adjusted for an “academic year” (Sep-Aug)…
Just catching up with some of my unread Bloglines and this post over at Shhhh!! made me snigger into my morning coffee 🙂
Rock The Reference Desk
I’m just busy putting together slides for some of the upcoming presentations and I thought it was about time I trawled through some of the OPAC usage stats to see if our students are still using some of the OPAC tweaks we’ve made.
The good news is that they are, and then some more!
First up, here’s the overall usage for 4 of the tweaks (May 2006 to July 2007):
At first glance, nothing too surprising — the overall trend follows the academic year, with the lull over summer.
What did leap out was the blue line (clicks on “people who borrowed this, also borrowed…” suggestions) — since this April, the usage has been higher than the “did you mean” spelling suggestions (red line). So, either our users have suddenly become better spellers, or they’re making much higher usage of the borrowing suggestions. If I was a betting man, I’d say it was the latter.
We’ve now got enough data to compare the same 3 months in 2006 and 2007 (May to July):
That second graph is why I’m sat here with a grin like a Cheshire Cat 😀
[update]
I’ve dug out the circulation stats for the same period and that re-inforces the statement that the students are making much higher usage of borrowing suggestions in 2007 than in 2006. You can see that the number of check outs (bold pink) pretty much matches the number of clicks on the “did you mean” spelling suggestions (red line in the first graph). Check outs have also risen in 2007 when compared to the same months in 2006.
Interestingly, I don’t think we’ve ever had a student go up to a member of staff and say “I’ve found the suggestions really useful” or “thank you for adding spell checking”. I wonder how many complaints we’d get it we turned the features off?
Contrary to any speculation you might see on snopes.com, I haven’t been abducted by aliens, joined a monastery, or fallen down an open manhole cover — the last couple of months have been fairly hectic and although I’ve kept saying to myself “I must remember to blog about XYZ”, life just keeps throwing stuff in my way.
Anyway, this morning I found out that Casey Durfee has left the Seattle Public Library to become the latest employee of LibraryThing — specifically he’s going to be working on the LibraryThing for Libraries product.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve added something to our OPAC or written a bit of code that I thought was new & cool only to find out that Mr Durfee had already done it.
I think I’m already on record as saying that if I lived in the USA, I’d camp outside Tim Spalding’s house with a large sign saying “Please let me work for LibraryThing! Will write code for coffee and peanuts!”. Come the day that LibraryThingGlobalHyperMegaCorpLtd opens its first UK office, I’ll be there with my sign.
So, with a huge amount of envy, I’d like to wish Casey all the best in his new job. I’d also like to thank him for the hundreds of helpful emails he’s sent to the IPAC and Horizon mailing lists over the last 6 years — there were many times when I seriously wondered if Casey knew more about how HIP worked than the developers at Dynix (and then SirsiDynix) did!