Hi Jan
I'm Gill, Systems Librarian at the National Library of Scotland. I was
interested to see and play with your new catalogue - it's very clean,
clear and easy to navigate. Congratulations! Here at NLS we are just
commencing a project to explore resource discovery solutions and one
area we were going to look at was how to make the searching more
intuitive / easier for our customers just like you have done. I have a
few questions for you if you have time:
1. What is the underlying software that you are using for your new
catalogue ?
2. Is your catalogue data harvested or is the searching being undertaken
on the live version ? If it's a harvested version how often do you
update your data ? If it's harvested how do you address the issue of
copy information being out of date.
3. When your customers place a reservation does the "look and feel" of
the system persist (I've seen some catalogues where you are dropped back
in to the native interface of the traditional OPAC)
4. How did you engage your customers for feedback and comments as you
developed the system ? Questionnaires ? Usability labs ?
5. Do you plan to integrate other datasets in to this new catalogue
(e.g. digital image databases, other catalogues etc)
6. Do you have any plans for future development ? Or maybe you are
taking a well deserved rest! :-)
Very best wishes from the other side of the world :-)
Gill
---------------------------------------------------
Gill Hamilton
Systems Librarian
National Library of Scotland
George IV Bridge
Edinburgh EH1 1EW
Scotland, UK
e: g.hamilton_at_nls.uk
t: +44 (0)131-623 3774 (desk)
t: +44 (0)7795 456348 (mobile)
w: http://www.nls.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Lavelle, Jan
Sent: 12 July 2007 01:38
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: [NGC4LIB] Faceted catalogue in Australia
The State Library of Tasmania has just gone fully live with our new
faceted catalogue, based on the Verity search engine. It's been quite a
long road(!), but it's finally in production. Our main issue has been
ensuring that the source catalogue data is of consistent quality to
produce clean and effective facets. The State Library of Tasmania runs
the public and reference library network for the whole state, and the
new catalogue has proved very popular with our clients as we've
gradually rolled it out. We've followed a progressive release process,
where we have asked our clients to comment on the new style catalogue
and suggest improvements. Responding to these suggestions has also
added to our development time, but we are now that much more confident
we have something that actually workds for our clients.
As far as we know, we're the first major library system in Australia to
go with a faceted catalogue. Please have a look if you get the chance.
http://catalogue.statelibrary.tas.gov.au/
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
Jan Lavelle
Senior Librarian (Systems Development)
State Library of Tasmania
91 Murray Street, Hobart 7000
Phone: 03 6233 4956
Fax: 03 6231 0927
Email : Jan.Lavelle_at_education.tas.gov.au
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Received on Thu Jul 12 2007 - 08:11:01 EDT