Katie,
Thank you very much for posting these as they will be very helpful for
those of us working with VUFind, but not yet ready to make it public to
our community.
Are you planning to post this message to the VUFind-General list? If
not, I'd be happy to forward it to that community.
Cheers,
Tim
Tim McGeary
Senior Systems Specialist
Lehigh University
610-758-4998
tim.mcgeary_at_lehigh.edu
Google Talk: timmcgeary
Yahoo IM: timmcgeary
Bauer, Kathleen wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Of possible interest to those who may be contemplating doing
> usability testing on their OPAC, Yale recently conducted two tests on
> pilot VuFind installations at Yale. One study looked at a subject
> based presentation of ebooks for the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
> http://www.library.yale.edu/libepub/usability/studies/summary_medical.doc
>
>
> and the other looked at a pilot test of Vufind with a sample of
> 400,000 records drawn from the Library's Voyager system
> http://www.library.yale.edu/libepub/usability/studies/summary_undergraduate.doc
>
>
> Test questions were drawn from user search logs in the current
> library system, and some were designed to test for those problems
> that the logs have demonstrated exist for patrons, such as incorrect
> spellings, and incomplete title information. In reading the reports
> please be aware that some of the problems uncovered may have had a
> lot to do with peculiarities of the Yale implementation, such as the
> sample of records imported into VuFind for this test, and less to do
> with VuFind itself.
>
> In general participants were intrigued by the possiblities offered by
> facets, although the topic facets in particular did not always seem
> to function as they expected or desired. The most desired feature
> participants wanted to see developed was an easy direct export from
> the catalog to a bibliographic citation management tool such as
> RefWorks and Endnote (while other catalogs may have this feature
> already, the current Voyager system at Yale does not a direct export
> feature.)
>
> Katie Bauer
>
>
> Katheen Bauer Director of Usability and Assessment Yale University
> Library 130 Wall Street P.O. Box 208240 New Haven, CT 06520-8240
>
> 203-248-3359 kathleen.bauer_at_yale.edu
>
Received on Wed May 28 2008 - 09:51:06 EDT