ERIC II Task Group

November 8, 2005
UMBC
Meeting Minutes

Present: Wilma Bass, Betty Day, Mary Gilbert, Heidi Hanson, Ted Kruse, Jean Phillips, Celia Rabinowitz, Linda Seguin (minutes), Marlene Vikor, Laura Wrubel

Status of action items from last meeting

Usability testing (Laura Wrubel, Mary Gilbert): report later on the agenda

Change location of Find it button (Heidi Hanson): done

Complete loader specs for Net Library (Jean Phillips): not done

Investigate Syndetics, Amazon and MARCit (Betty Day):

• MARCit - based on total enrollment
• Amazon - No quote yet; it's difficult to contact a person there
• Syndetics - a subsidiary of Bowker; has a variety of options with different pricing for each.
  • All options
  • T.O.C. only
  • Summaries/first chapters
  • Cover images
  • Reviews
  • Series info
  See the Rochester Institute of Technology http://albert.rit.edu/ for an example of a catalog with Syndetics services implemented.

Betty suggested that we might consider Gale's Book Review Plus as an alternative to getting reviews via Syndetics.

Celia pointed out that we should carefully consider cost/benefit of these services as expenditures on other services will also increase dramatically in FY 08.

Ted wondered what proportion of USMAI's materials would have Syndetics data associated with them.

Prepare justification for using MARCit for a single-record approach (Linda Seguin, Marlene Vikor, Wilma Bass): not done, though progress was made on other fronts

• The group worked with Jean Phillips, Ben Wallberg and Fahnbulleh Zarzar on strategies for loading SFX data to multiple records
• Marlene reported that, whether we use MARCit or generate our own records, the likelihood for adding even more duplicate records to the database is high. In particular, print records for older JSTOR titles tend to lack the ISSN which will be the match point for the SFX loader. In addition, the lack of an ISSN in the bib records is an impediment to linking to SFX via the open URL.
• It is unlikely that we would load MARCit records for the spring release of Find It; Betty pointed out that the quote she got from MARCit was only good for 90 days.

Draft ERIC II status report for CLD (Jean Phillips): not done

Comparison of SFX Knowledge Base (Laura Wrubel): not done

Develop ERIC II Web site (Jean Phillips, Betty Day, Laura Wrubel): in progress

• Laura showed that the Web page is now linked on the USMAI Committees and Groups page. http://usmai.umd.edu/eric2/ Some links have been added; more recent minutes need to be added.
• There was a suggestion to add a link to the RIT catalog.

Test SFX in Test Catalog (Ted Kruse): The functionality worked okay, but its use was not intuitive.

Usability testing/sfx in the catalog (Laura Wrubel)

Testing involved faculty at Towson and undergraduate and graduate students at UMCP. ERIC II thanks Nancy Falgren and Sara Snyder for conducting the tests.

Laura showed clips from some of the testing sessions. Prior to the meeting, she supplied a link to the written results of the testing: http://usmai.umd.edu/userinter/usability.html

Most users did not click Find It at all. If they did recognize the possibility of online full text, they tended to use the URLs in the bibliographic display or, in the case of Towson faculty, the link on the availability screen. Others thought that they should be able to click on the title link to get to full text, as in Research Port. Those who did click Find It tended to overlook the link to full text in the menu. When they clicked the link to availability in the catalog, the size of the window and design of the availability screen made it difficult for them to see the necessary information.

Students had difficulty interpreting the full display of the serial record. They expected to see volume (holdings) information on that screen.

One recurring theme was that users believed that they were already searching the USMAI catalog rather than their local catalogs because they saw other campus' holdings in their results.

The group suggested the following possibilities to try to address the problems that were revealed in the testing:

• Make the link to full text in the Find It menu more prominent - Laura reported that this is probably not possible as there is one template and the text is already set to bold.
• Suppress the URLs that are currently in bibliographic records - this is already part of the plan, but cannot really be done until the SFX load is complete; we would only want to suppress URLs where full text is available via SFX (e.g. not government documents). Records can be mocked-up for testing, however.
• If possible, display good URLs (e.g. government documents) from the bibliographic record in the Find It menu
• Suppress other campus' holdings in the local filters so that users are not mislead into believing they are in the global catalog
• Remove the search shortcut link from the title field.
• Link to information about the library on the availability screen - people expected to be able to click on the name of the library and find out where it was
• Suppress the publication history on serial records - users are still confusing it with holdings information
• Remove all holdings links from the full display, forcing users to go through Find It? - Jean cautioned against depending on having all of our services go through SFX; if SFX goes down, how will our users get to the information?
• Move holdings display down to the bottom of the screen, including summary holdings (like the Melvyl catalog http://melvyl.cdlib.org ) - users may be more prone to click on Find It and they would be able to view the summary holdings information without having to click the "Holdings" link.

The group agreed that most of the design changes would either be too radical for a "soft" release or would have to wait for the loaders to be completed. Therefore, the soft release will probably be much like the current test catalog.

A subgroup of members from the User Interface Task Group and ERIC II will work on a catalog redesign for the December meeting. More usability testing should be done in January.

The Netlibrary agenda item was tabled until the next meeting.

The next full ERIC II meeting will be on Dec. 13 at 9:00 at College Park (room TBA). Topics to be covered include Netlibrary, a timeline and the open forum.

The maintenance/loader subgroup will meet on Nov. 29 at 9:30 at College Park.

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