OCLC study and report on online catalogs

1. Online Catalogs: Designing with Users in Mind Webinar August 13, 2009 Christie Heitkamp Manager, User Experience & Information Architecture Team, WorldCat Local & WorldCat.org Karen Calhoun Vice President, WorldCat and Metadata Services

2. Polling –What Do You Think? 1. Our staff understand what our end users want from our catalog A – True B – False C – Don’t know By pirate johnny http://www.flickr.com/photos/piratejohnny/2798872422/

3. More Polling 2. My library’s end users are satisfied with our online catalog A – True B – False C – Don’t know By: sea turtle http://www.flickr.com/photos/sea-turtle/3181321172/

4. More Polling 3. My library’s cataloging practices and priorities reflect what end users want from our catalog A – True B – False C – Don’t know

5. An introduction Use, User, and Usability Studies

6. Agenda Introduction to user experience Usability studies conducted on WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local over the past few years Meet the “users”

7. Credits Arnold Arcolio Mike Prasse OCLC Marketing group – Joanne Cantrell WorldCat Local Pilot partners

8. Usability & User Experience User Experience (from wikipedia) User experience design, most often abbreviated UX, but sometimes UE, is a term used to describe the overarching experience a person has as a result of their interactions with a particular product or service, its delivery, and related artifacts, according to their design

10. User Surveys: links or popups from our site

11. Focus Groups: discussion groups with customers or users

12. Contextual Interviews: 1:1 observations and interviews of users in their own environment

13. Card Sorts: 1:1 activity with a user to understand their mental model and information organization

15. Who is using the catalog?

16. What kind of students are these?

17. What kind of search? 80% known item searching

18. What kind of item? 74% book searches

19. Meet the “user” – primary personas of worldcat.org

20. Questions?

21. Study results Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want

22. Credits: Online Catalogs Study With thanks to Janet Hawk, Joanne Cantrell, Peggy Gallagher, OCLC Market Research Photo by allw3ndyhttp://flickr.com/photos/allw3ndy/2757149584/

23. Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want End-Users expect online catalogs: to look like popular Web sites to have summaries, abstracts, tables of contents to help find needed information Librarians expect online catalogs: to serve end users’ information needs to help staff carry out work responsibilities to have accurate, structured data to exhibit classical principles of organization http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/onlinecatalogs/default.htm

24. Objectives of our metadata quality research Start over without assumptions about what “quality” is Identify and compare metadata expectations End users Librarians Compare expectations of types of librarians Define a new WorldCat quality program … Taking into account the perspectives of all constituencies of WorldCat End users (and subgroups of end users) Librarians (and subgroups of librarians)

25. Research methodologies and demographics Focus groups Conducted by Blue Bear, LLC Three sessions: College students, general public, scholars Pop-up survey on WorldCat.org Conducted by ForeSee Results 11,000+ responses: Students (28%), educators (22%), business professionals (19%), other; mix of ages; 44% from outside U.S. Librarian survey Conducted by Marketing Backup 1,397 responses; North America (64%) and outside North America (36%); academic, public, special libraries; staff with roles in technical and public services, ILL, directors

26. What did we learn?End-user focus group results Key observations: Delivery is as important, if not more important, than discovery. Seamless, easy flow from discovery through delivery is critical. Summaries and tables of contents are key elements of a description Improved search relevance is necessary.

27. What did we learn?End-user focus group results

28. What did we learn?End-user focus group results “End users enter a few short search statements into online IR systems. Generally, their queries bear two to four words.”—Karen Markey Twenty-five years of end user searching, Part 1: Research findings. 2007. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/56093 Other key findings of our study: Keyword searching is king, but … Advanced search (fielded searching) is useful Faceted browse is useful These help end users refine searches, navigate, browse, and manage large result sets

29. What did we learn?Pop-up survey suggestions Changes to help identify an item? End users (n=7535)

30. End-user recommendations Improve search relevance Add more links to online full text (and make linking easy) Add more summaries/abstracts: Make summaries more prominent Add more details in the search results (e.g., cover art and summaries)

31. Librarian/staff survey results Recommended enhancements to WorldCatTotal librarian responses

32. End-User Results: Recommended Enhancements Librarian/Staff Results: Highlighted Differences 14 Recommended enhancements to WorldCatTotal end-user responses 1 4

33. What did we learn?Librarians’ Perceptions of What End-Users Want Recommended enhancements to WorldCat

34. What did we learn?Librarians’ Perceptions of What End-Users Want (2) Recommended enhancements to WorldCat

35. Recommendations from librarian survey Merge duplicates Make it easier to make corrections to records (fix typos; do upgrades); “social cataloging” experiment—Wikipedia More emphasis on accuracy/currency of library holdings Enrichment—TOCs, summaries, cover art—work with content suppliers, use APIs, etc. More communication about what users say they want

36. Questions?

37. results WorldCat Local Usability Testing

39. University of California

40. Berkeley

41. Davis

42. Irvine

43. The Ohio State University

44. Peninsula Library System, San Mateo, California

45. Free Library of Urbana

46. Des Plaines Public Library

47. Northeastern Illinois University

55. For more information about the usability studies we’ve done and a summary of results written by Arnold Arcolio, visit: http://www.oclc.org/worldcatlocal/usability

56. Questions?

57. What does it mean for my library? Conclusion

58. What Does It Mean For Aligning What My Library Does with What Users Want? By: David Wulffhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/dwulff/5357629/

59. Question 3 Revisited 3b. My library’s cataloging practices and priorities reflect what end users want from our catalog A – True B – False C – Don’t know

60. Two Starting Points Paying attention to what’s important about records Aligning librarian and staff priorities with end user priorities E-resources, books, media, unique digital collections, special collection Redesigning work practices

61. Based on our two studies, what’s important about records? Delivery information – item availability and links to content Basic bibliographic information (title, author, publication year, publisher, format, edition, language) Evaluative content like summaries Fielded indexing (to support advanced search) Faceted browse (based on controlled forms names, topics, tags, etc.) Social features (for some audiences)

62. Follow up What did you think of the format of today’s session? (Webex with polling and chat) What did you think of the content of the presentation? What did you get out of the session that you can use in your work? What do you wish we had talked about?

63. Thank You!Christie Heitkamp, heitkamc @oclc.orgKaren Calhoun, calhounk@oclc.org