Knowing Catalog Users Through Their Digital Footprints
Description
Many libraries have ʺNext Generationʺ OPACs, featuring faceted search, relevancy-ranked results, favorites, etc. How are they being used? Usability tests and reference librarian feedback are necessary but insufficient when many of your users don't enter the library at all. In this session, the presenter will briefly address the challenges of implementing a modern OPAC, look at how we collect analytics, and then try to answer questions about how good our search results are, what features are used and which are ignored, and how librarian activity can skew the results even at an institution as large as the University of Michigan.
Start Date
19-3-2014 2:30 PM
End Date
19-3-2014 3:30 PM
Knowing Catalog Users Through Their Digital Footprints
Many libraries have ʺNext Generationʺ OPACs, featuring faceted search, relevancy-ranked results, favorites, etc. How are they being used? Usability tests and reference librarian feedback are necessary but insufficient when many of your users don't enter the library at all. In this session, the presenter will briefly address the challenges of implementing a modern OPAC, look at how we collect analytics, and then try to answer questions about how good our search results are, what features are used and which are ignored, and how librarian activity can skew the results even at an institution as large as the University of Michigan.