One of the things that stuck out to me in the report was user's
confusion about whether they could find articles in the catalog, as well
as user's unhappiness with having to learn new interfaces for additional
scholarly databases.
Are you considering trying to address the scholarly database issue with
some kind of federated broadcast search, aggregated index, or other
means of attempting to integrate scholarly article results in the main
interface?
Jonathan
Montibello, Joseph P. wrote:
> Jennifer,
>
> Thanks so much for sharing this useful and very interesting report with the community. We talk so much about how we need to know what the users need. As you say in the report, this is not a comprehensive, end-all be-all type of report, but it answers a few questions and prompts even more.
>
> Cheers!
> Joe Montibello
> Class of 1945 Library
> Phillips Exeter Academy
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:08:48 -0400
> From: Jennifer Bowen <jbowen_at_LIBRARY.ROCHESTER.EDU>
> Subject: Preliminary report on user research for eXtensible Catalog
>
> (Posted on behalf of Nancy Fried Foster, nfoster_at_library.rochester.edu)
>
> The eXtensible Catalog project at the University of Rochester's River Campus
> Libraries is pleased to release the first report on the user research that
> we conducted in support of XC software development. We thank the Andrew W.
> Mellon Foundation and our user research partners - Cornell, Ohio State, Yale
> and the University of Rochester - for their generous support of this project.
>
> Use this URL - http://hdl.handle.net/1802/6873 - for a report that
> summarizes the objectives, methods, and major software design findings from
> the data collected in the user research portion of the eXtensible Catalog
> (XC) project. A full analysis and interpretation of the data is not included
> in the present report and will be provided at the conclusion of the project.
> This report includes edited results from the brainstorming sessions and a
> list of the features that emerged from the analysis of those results. (See
> the eXtensible Catalog website at www.eXtensibleCatalog.org for more
> information about the overall
> project.)
>
>
Received on Tue Jun 16 2009 - 10:21:15 EDT