That brought up another thought: I suspect (but have no hard facts to back
this up, just a gut feeling) that a lot of my patrons who claim they miss
the ol' card catalog and ask for help looking up books on our OPAC use
Google, Yahoo and Amazon (among other sites) all the time, but don't see any
connection between using those sites and using a library OPAC.
(The patrons who sigh wistfully about the card catalog are almost never the
older or younger patrons. It's generally people between 30-50 who vocally
long for the good old days. The younger patrons have never used anything but
an OPAC. And the older, I guess, have either joined the "if you can't beat
'em" club, using the OPAC and our electronic reference with the best of
them, or they've just given up completely and don't even try--they just ask
us at the reference desk to find items and information for them.)
--Joshua M. Neff
Indian Creek Branch
Olathe Public Library
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Jeremy Dunck
Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2006 4:17 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Thanks Karen
On 6/14/06, Joshua Neff <jneff_at_olatheks.org> wrote:
> 3) Patrons new to our system frequently need assistance in locating
> items in our catalog, especially if it involves anything beyond a
> basic title or author search, but the assistance is usually only for
> small problems which are easily solved.
In my dayjob, we have an online store with a large catalog of products. So
many products that finding the right product is a real problem, not least
because our customers aren't that familiar with the nuances of the products.
(Sounds a bit like library patrons, no?)
I routinely hear fellow employees (consider these in-branch patrons) having
trouble finding their product on the store, and appealing to our resident
catalog expert for assistance.
Of course, the people, you know, using it online, and not in the branch, are
probably having the same problems, but don't have access to a resident
specialist (modulo Ask A Librarian, which I admit is better than our
customer's access to our catalog specialist).
I'm sure we lose a lot of sales that way. But it's a soft cost, and we
don't hear too often from people that weren't able to find the product.
It's easy to forget about them.
I've never convinced our expert (or the business owner) that there's a
problem to be solved.
Received on Wed Jun 14 2006 - 19:42:04 EDT