Inspiring the iGeneration, Wolverhampton

I seem to be following Brian Kelly around at the moment — having managed to pick up his cold at ILI on Monday, I gave a presentation after him at the “Inspiring the iGeneration” event in Wolverhampton yesterday.
My presentation (which was a hotch-potch of survey stats, recent news items, and examples) is available on Slideshare. There’s also some photographs on Flickr, including…
igen_012 igen_007 igen_009

Woohoo – my brother is in Wikipedia!

Not sure if he knows it, but I’ve just spotted that my older brother Simon gets a mention on the Pennine Radio Wikipedia page. Sadly he doesn’t appear in this video…
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYX3BUBkzAU]
…I can’t believe their original jingle was “Pennine 235, that’s the sound goin’ into your ‘ear’oles”!

The Happy Endings Foundation

Both the Daily Mail and The Guardian appear to have suckered by a website that claims “Children’s books that don’t have happy endings should be banned” and that a mass “bad book” burning is planned for later this month:
http://thehappyendingsfoundation.org
If they’d bothered to check who’d registered the domain, they’d have soon spotted that the site is run by a marketing company (ArtScience) who have created a number of web sites for “A Series of Unfortunate Events”. Just in case you were thinking about doing it, don’t bother looking at the ArtScience web site — it’s a painful example of just how bad Flash splash web sites can be!

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:

Continue reading “OPAC Survey – Q2a – Meeting User Needs and Expectations”

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)

Continue reading “OPAC Survey – Final Results”