03/28/2007
by:Barbara Polowy, Smith
Five College Libraries
Research, Instruction and Outreach Committee (RIO)
Minutes of the March 12, 2007 Meeting
Present: Bonnie Vigeland (chair), Bryan Goodwin, Margaret Groesbeck, Sherre Harrington, Beth Lang, Barbara Polowy (recorder)
Meetings
∑ Bonnie will send the minutes of the February 12 meeting to members.
∑ At Barbara’s request, the May meeting was rescheduled and will now convene on May 7 at 10:00 a.m.
∑ An extra meeting was schedule for Monday, March 26, at 9:00 a.m. at Hampshire.
Online Survey about OPAC
∑ A few changes were suggested to the draft of the RIO survey to gather quantifiable data on known problems and to help prioritize these issues for future OPAC improvements. A short series of questions will be added to help us determine which features of the catalog are being used by library patrons (advanced search, limits, etc.). A brief statement will be included at the top of the survey page explaining the purpose of the questions. Sherre suggested that the demographics question be a required field.
∑ Bonnie will contact Jan Jourdain to find out if it’s possible to put a link to the survey on the basic search page. There will also be links to the survey on each library’s website.
∑ Margaret will discuss RIO’s changes with Susan Edwards(who developed the survey) and will email committee members the link to the revised draft.
OPAC Usability Focus Groups
∑ Committee members would like to proceed with focus groups facilitated by Susan Kohler-Gray at UMass and one of the colleges if funding is available. Barbara will contact Susan to determine when she’s available in April and get an estimate for facilitating and reporting on four focus group sessions. Sherre will make a request for funding at the FCLD meeting on March 16.
∑ There was a brief discussion about the possibility of RIO observers – either in the room with the participants or in a psychology or education lab observation room. Barbara will ask Susan if observers would be disruptive to the focus group discussions, Beth and Bryan will see if UMass and Mount Holyoke have observation labs on their campus.
OPAC Usability Testing
∑ Committee members agreed that questions should be task oriented and discussed key issues to test. Barbara circulated questions developed by Smith’s usability team and Bonnie will draft questions and circulate to RIO before the next meeting.
∑ The specific questions, a timeline, and number and types of test subjects will be finalized at the next meeting.
Catalog Enrichment
Janet Ewing, chair of DEDCC, has asked RIO to respond to a DEDCC proposal to enhance the catalog with features such as those provided by Syndetics and other companies – images of book jackets, links to reviews, tables of contents, etc. Some campuses are very interested in these enhancements and others are not. One concern about Syndetics products is the assumption that added images would slow Aleph response time even further. All were interesting in exploring social networking options (Library Thing, Penn tags) for the catalog and most were interested in providing links to review sources from existing subscriptions and free sources using SFX links in the catalog. Bonnie will respond to Janet on behalf of RIO.
Testing Aleph Service Packs
∑ RIO reviewed its charge as explained in Chris Hannon’s email of February 27. Members reviewed the list of changes and fixes related to the most recent service pack and each member was assigned items to test in the test OPAC on a pc using IE and Firefox and on a Mac using Firefox and Safari: Bryan will test 491 and 516, Margaret will test 589 and 698, Bonnie will best 703 and 716, Beth wil test 578 and 626, Barbara will test 714 and 577.
∑ Bonnie will email the feedback form to members. All should do their testing and use the form to report to Beth by March 14 at noon. She will compile the results for the March 15 AMC meeting. [NB testing was delayed by the AMC, Beth Lang will notify RIO members when the test catalog is ready for checking).
Reindexing the Catalog to Eliminate Initial Articles
The FC Cataloging Committee has contacted RIO to discuss the possibility of reindexing the Aleph database to eliminate all English-language initial articles. Before making such a sweeping change, RIO would like to explore other solutions to the problem of searching titles with initial articles – dropping all English-language initial articles would cause other OPAC searching problems. Ideally, users would be able to retrieve the same results whether or not their search statement included an initial article. This is an issue that Ex Libris may have to solve.
Alerts
Discussion of Alerts features and vocabulary was deferred to a future meeting.
