Dave Pattern from the University of Huddersfield in the UK wants to know. He’s asking libraries worldwide to fill out his OPAC survey.
He’s planning to use it in a presentation he’s giving at LiS 2007 on 18th April, and to write an informal report around the middle of May. He’s already given a preliminary outline of the standout results from the 650 who have already responded, but would really like more contributions.
I see from this last post that he suspects that Australians are maybe the most honest people in the world. Now wouldn’t you like to help out a guy who draws such nice conclusions from data that actually shows we have the most “OPAC-envy”?
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April 1, 2007 at 16:11
I’m just about to move to a public library, and the OPAC there is quite unusable. Frankly, you need a qualification in Library Science to be able to operate it properly.
Interestingly enough, when I spoke to one of the staff about making changes to it, I was told that I would have to try to negotiate with the IT department to get anything changed, and they think that librarians are stupid and know nothing about technology, so good luck.
Does anybody else have these kind of problems, where they’re keen to be innovative, but other departments that they rely on drag them back down?
April 1, 2007 at 18:50
Hi Andrew
Sadly, I think it’s a common story in UK public libraries.
The irony is that the survey is showing that public libraries are much more interested in adding user centric features (user tagging, comments, etc) than academic libraries are, but it’s generally the academic libraries that are in a better position to actually develop these features.