Re: who is the primary user?

I would describe our primary users in the following hierarchy:
students
faculty & staff
students and faculty from other educational institutions
non-affiliated users
      townies
      genealogists

Of course, we get non-affiliated users who are primarily interested our
non-filtered, no-login public stations to pursue their artistic
interests and they might not even realize that we have a catalog.

I'm with Karen on removing unnecessary search refinements from the first
page.  Our system includes a series search.  I looked at the search logs
for a six month period and it was pretty obvious that the librarians
were the only users making effective use of that search.  I saw just
about everything BUT a series title in the searches. People were using
call numbers as a series search.

Mack

K.G. Schneider wrote:
> I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. Our library catalog is used
> daily by our patrons – and without it people wouldn’t be able to find
> anything. They use it to find books, to access our electronic resources, to
> check their records, etc. Statistics even show that students are searching
> for items more than ever. Yet, they also show that they are using subject
> searches most often – and having difficulty finding information that way.
>
> ———-
> In 2002, one of the first modifications to Librarians' Internet Index on my
> watch—a data-driven decision based on what I saw from search log analysis
> generated for another purpose—was to *remove* the options to refine the
> search on the front page by subject, title, URL, description, and I forget
> what. Search failures dropped a whole bunch. I forget the percentage, I can
> look it up, it was high double digits.
>
> Someone then said I was Dumbing Down LII. I remember sharing that with Roy
> Tennant, whose comment was, "good." It has kinda been my goal with our
> project to keep dumbing it down until even I can use it successfully all the
> time.
>
> I also remember a guy from a NJ system who in the late 1990s often said he
> wanted to remove the subject search from the public's view of the catalog.
> The fact is that if you designed a catalog interface from the user backwards
> you'd at best offer subject searching buried on an "advanced" page, with a
> warning/explanation. Putting "subject" searching on the main page is part of
> the collective denial we're in that users understand how and when to use it.
>
> ————
>
> My comment about library staff being the primary audience was worded badly.
> I meant that in its current iteration it is most intelligible to library
> staff – and in that way I think they are the audience that understands it
> and uses it to its fullest capacity. I guess I see the catalog as having
> been designed for use by library staff – and that seems to be one it biggest
> problems because we are not the primary audience.
>
> —-
> Indeed! Not only that—but often librarians overestimate their own ability to
> successfully use features—or whether the features will be used at all—or
> whether they are even needed.
>
> Karen G. Schneider
> kgs_at_bluehighways.com


--
Mack Lundy
Systems Librarian
College of William and Mary, Swem Library
malund_at_wm.edu
Office:  757-221-3114
Cell:    757-817-4069