JISC LMS Tabbloid 29-9-10

29 September 2010

Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR b.showers@jisc.ac.uk

ESEARCH BLOG

need to be resolved by buying in additional consultancy days.

One Minute Blog

Inspite of that, or perhaps because of it, I think the case study we will be producing as the final output of the JISC project will provide a useful reference point for colleagues in similar institutions considering the introduction of this type of software. It will also hopefully contribute to the literature on the user behaviour of a group of HE students (‘nontraditional mature returners) familiar to all mixed economy colleges like our own.

SEP 28, 2010 05:13A.M. This posting is late due to the fact that on returning from the JISC event in Glasgow, we attempted to make some changes to the Primo user interface and lost both of our interface views. We’ve been told by ExLibris that there is no way of retrieving these from a backup file (which seems to indicate a flaw in the system somewhere) and have therefore had to start from scratch in recreating the views. And just a couple of days before we were due to launch the software at the start of our new academic year. Oh dear! Anyway, here goes.

UEAWOLFIE

Top 5 Library Loans

The main driver behind the choice of Primo as an interface was an Action Research Project on information skills needs with Level 4 learners which confirmed many of the conclusions of the 2008 CIBER report ‘Information behaviour of the researcher of the future’. Students used Google and Wikipedia in preference to the more complex subscription databases, which they found difficult to access and navigate. This led to student frustration and impacted on the quality of material being used and subsequently levels of achievement and retention. Our challenge therefore was to produce a user friendly interface students and staff could engage with. We chose Primo because we felt it gave us a shop front for our services and a search engine combined which we could customise to create, if necessary, a number of different interface ‘flavours’.

SEP 27, 2010 06:59A.M.

The focal point of the JISC project is the usability study. So far we’ve recruited around 100 students from four very different subject areas as a representational cross-section and they’ve tested the interface to destruction. So far, it has had mixed reviews. Generally, the more confident the student with searching, the happier they were with the Primo interface. We’re now working on analysing their often very different demands and trying to customise the interface accordingly.

This is an ongoing process for us as the interface will be tested and redesigned with the help of users until we feel we’ve got it right. This is important as e-Search, as we’ve branded the software, is seen as a central aid to our information literacy programme, a key resource in delivering the most up-to-date research material to staff desktops and a vital means of communicating with all our user groups.

We have expanded our web service to list the top 5 library loans for a given course. Using the course code for the respective degree programme, the web service communicates with the UEA’s data mining system to reveal the top 5 most popular books for students of that course.

For an FE College with a very small project team this has proved to be a much more complex and challenging implementation than the original Ex-Libris sales pitch led us to believe and, particularly with this latest hiccup, we are not as far along the road as we would have wished to be approaching the new academic year. The events of the last few days have obviously created concerns about training and backup issues which will

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29 September 2010

SWWHEP LIBRARIES SHARED RESOURCE DISCOVERY

considering it for other applications, possibly even a full library management system.

Why and what is SWWHEPSRCH? A brief “pitch”

Where next?

SEP 27, 2010 06:33A.M.

The new catalogue – branded iFind Discover – is now in beta test and we will be monitoring and reporting on user reaction. First-line support for the product has been transferred from the SWWHEP project to library IT staff, but there will continue to be a program of enhancements implemented on a monthly basis.

At the recent JISC LMS event, we were asked to produce a one-minute pitch of our projects, so here goes for #swwhepsrch What is swwhepsrch?

Luke O’Sullivan, who carried out most of the development work, recently attended the VuFind developer’s conference at Villanova University in the USA, and we are hopeful that some of his work, particularly regarding the multi-system connection, will become part of the main product and readily available to other library consortia across the world.

This project is a case study on the implementation of VuFind as a shared resource discovery platform for the three university libraries in the South West Wales Higher Education Partnership (SWWHEP) : Swansea University, Swansea Metropolitan University and Trinity University College, Carmarthen (now part of the University of Wales Trinity St.David).

ENCLAVE Why a shared discovery platform?

EnCLaVE elevator pitch

The aim of SWWHEP is to establish greater collaboration and cooperation between the member institutions, in order to improve and expand services available to their staff and students in an efficient and cost-effective manner. For the SWWHEP library project, this involves providing users with greater and easier access to resources across the three institutions, through various means including a common RFID self-service environment, a document delivery service between institutions and full reciprocal borrowing.

SEP 27, 2010 05:23A.M. The ‘Only to the First Floor’ pitch With appropriate acknowledgements to The Guardian’s John Crace and his ‘Digested read, digested’, the one floor elevator pitch is: “EnCLaVE aims to understand Library Management System (LMS) users better, reach them more effectively, provide them with a richer experience, and provide the wider community with the ability to do the same. Embedding the LMS into the Virtual Learning Environment adds user and course context to any search”.

To facilitate common access to resources, we need a common discovery service. To improve upon the discovery services already available, we need a next-generation interface. After examining various options, the project decided to implement the discovery interface using the Open Source VuFind product, backed up with the propriortary Metalib/SFX product for searching electronic resources.

The ‘All the way to the top of Edinburgh’s Appleton Tower’ pitch

Why VuFind and Why OpenSource?

The University of Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland are the joint lead institutions for the Scottish Digital Library Consortium (SDLC), with a long record of working together for mutual benefit. Since the late 90s, the SDLC has operated a shared LMS infrastructure, running the Ex Libris Voyager application on hardware based at, and supported by, the University of Edinburgh.

Both organisations also use the Aquabrowser discovery system.

VuFind provided most of the next-generation functionality we were looking for, and in our opinion stood up well against the commercial options. Being an open source product, there was no purchase cost, which was important given our fixed budget. More importantly, it gave us the ability to tailor it to our needs as much as we needed or desired.

The most important part aspect of this was enhancing the product so that it communicates with the institutions’ three separate library management systems simultaneously, since it is the LMSs which provide live availability data and allow users to renew materials, place reservations and check their library accounts. The flexibility offered by open source also allowed us to make other changes to the interface in order to provide a library catalogue that is significantly better than any of those previously on offer.

The choice of VuFind also gave the university libraries an opporunity to try open source on a relatively small scale as a possible prelude to

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29 September 2010

Aquabrowser, and what they particularly like about it. We have also benefited from having a relevant partner JISC LMS project on our doorstep (AquaBrowserUX) conducting user testing of Edinburgh University’s students on our Aquabrowser installation.

CREDAUL

cjkeene SEP 26, 2010 03:52P.M. This project is partly being funded by the JISC as part of their Library Management Systems Programme (referred to as jisclms). The JISC provide services and fund projects related to developing University IT, Libraries, web services, e-learning and research.

Visualisation of the EnCLaVE project

The various projects (all based at UK Universities) which are being funded by jisclms recently met up in Glasgow for a two day meeting. This was a incredibly productive event, to discover what others are working on, share experiences and , and discuss areas and issues which we currently face with library management systems. The latter included issues around OSS LMS (what are the issues, and how could they see the introduction in UK academic libraries), Shared Electronic Resource Management and Usability/User Experience. What was clear was that the benefit of the projects as whole was greater than the sum of each project combined. Each project requires that University to reuse, open up, or export data in a new way. It forces openness and the net effect is that there will be multiple people around the UK who have recent experience in using LMS data and using it with new applications. This helps create a community who and share and promote such innovation, and help others who are interested in trying such things. It helps to set a ball rolling, or rather, gives a ball which was starting to move slowly a very big push.

SDLC partners have been considering how to provide the best possible user experience, given the assumption that a ‘next generation’ LMS is still several years away, and the JISC LMS programme offered an opportunity to investigate a number of opportunities: • Whether the recently upgraded Voyager OPAC module could be enhanced to replicate Aquabrowser functionality • Whether more could be done to expose the catalogue more effectively in key user spaces (the WebCT Virtual Learning Environment was identified for the purposes of the project) • Whether new routes to discovery would add value to the user experience, building on previous work to generate wordclouds dynamically from catalogue searches The intended outcome of our work is:

• JISC page on the jisclms programme: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/jisclms.aspx

• A richer experience for the user • Jisclms resource page http://code.google.com/p/jisclms/ • A more relevant experience for the user • Image showing the different projects and the systems they work with. The key here is that libraries have tended to work with the community around their LMS, creating five or so somewhat isolated communities, but as you can see in this diagram, this hopefully helps to break down the barriers. We have have been part of the Talis (our LMS) community, but our now working closly with Swansea, and sharing notes with Kent (neither use Talis ) as we setup our VuFind installation. http://www.flickr.com/photos/creatinginthedark/4992287137/

• A better understanding of what the user expects and requires • Transferable functionality which Edinburgh University Library can offer to SDLC partners • Transferable functionality with appropriate documentation which other Voyager users can deploy in their own environments • An improved understanding of user behaviours

• A blog providing an overview of developments: http://lmsmash.blogspot.com/

• An assessment of digital library architecture, supporting decisionmaking on how to deploy different discovery layers, and whether extra layers, at additional cost, add significant value

• A Google Reader bundle of all blogs (that I am aware of) related to jisclms projects http://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user%2F11598365848111438788%2F

Some evaluation work has been done to understand how users use

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• Archive of tweets using the #jisclms hastag http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/jisclms

trying to locate an item for a user will find it useful, e.g. to check for Interlibrary loan requests, increasing efficiency and service. Users have another interface to search the Sussex catalogue should our main catalogue not be available, you can restrict a search to just one Library. It helps us to work together with Brighton in developing something, and the end product may help future collaborations. The interface will are developing (called VuFind, a free off the shelve application used by other Universities) has good support for mobile devices and integrating with applications such as Zotero.

Tagged: jiscLMS

CREDAUL What’s in it for BSMS? At the moment they have to search two different catalogues as their books and resources are split between the two Universities. They will now just need to do one search and can quickly see which Library it is at and if it is available. This will improve the experience for the medical students and staff, who often have a very high work load.

cjkeene SEP 26, 2010 03:06P.M.

What’s in it for the local community? members of the public may have reason to refer to an item in a local academic library. If they wish to access an academic book, and would like to check to see if it is in a local academic library, they can now do so using just one search from one interface.

What’s in it for other Universities? We are writing up our experience on this blog, and finding other ways to share what we have learnt. Using Open Source discovery layer applications is something of a hot topic at the moment. We have looked at two: Vufind and Blacklight, and are writing up our findings. We are also writing up our experience with VuFind and how we installed it. We’ll also write up how we found setting up a union catalogue of two libraries records and holdings.

• ‘The name “elevator pitch” reflects the idea that it should be possible to deliver an elevator pitch in the time span of an elevator ride, or approximately thirty seconds to two minutes.‘ (wikipedia)

PS some background to this post: http://lmsmash.blogspot.com/2010/09/conversations-for-very-shortlift.html

• Militant British-English speakers may prefer “lift pitch” • Those who find a ‘pitch’ a little crass may prefer ‘conciseexplanation-of-product-or-idea-while-in-lift’. Frankly, it looses some bite.

Tagged: credual, elevator_pitch, event, jiscLMS, This_is_a_great_project

• Here’s ours…

The University of Sussex and The University of Brighton have various partnerships and joint initiatives, helped by their close proximity. The most prominent of these is the joint medical school: BSMS (Brighton and Sussex Medical School).

The CReDAUL project is creating a combined web catalogue of the University of Brighton and the University of Sussex Libraries. It will contain all the items of both libraries in one interface, so users can see at a glance if either library has a book or other item, and if so at which library and branch.

What’s in it for Sussex? Researchers and students can easily search University libraries to see if a book is available locally. Library staff

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29 September 2010

OSSVIAB - EXPLORING OPEN SOURCE VIABILITY PROJECT

be moved to the next level (perhaps with a follow on project) to assess the financial benefits of implementing open source over a proprietary alternative… here again there are promising signs coming out of the North American implementations, and from open source experiences in other software arenas and UK libraries really need to take these on board in these straightened financial times.

A short ‘pitch’ for the #ossviab project - What we’re doing & why you should care…

SEP 25, 2010 10:27A.M.

The project will also give out some early indicators on the potential impact of supporting open source in terms of staff development, and again I think this is incredibly useful. Libraries in the UK do need to think to the current skill sets of their workforces, and I for one strongly believe that open source would help create a subset of staff who are highly aware of and competent in the technical and systems side of the profession – and given the pace of technological change in the sector within which libraries operate that will also be a vital thing required for libraries to stay viable themselves in the coming years.

At the recent #jisclms programme managers meeting we were all asked to think about our products in terms of how we could ‘pitch’ their usefulness to others in our sector. Here’s my thoughts on #ossviab: What is #ossviab?

It’s a JISC funded project looking to examine the viability of open source, specifically the open source library management system ‘Evergreen’, for implementation into the UK HE market.

So to sum up, basically we aim to prove (or disprove) that, taking Evergreen as a signature example, open source is a viable option for the UK, detail any technical benefits now (or potentially in the future), and start to open a wider debate on the impact open source can have on libraries, our workforce, our finances, and our long term strategic development viewpoint

Why open source, and why Evergreen?

Libraries face a very challenging period over the next few years on a number of fronts. I believe that utilisation of open source can help us at least start to address some of those challenges in a manner that is both a) realistic in terms of current capabilities and b) moves libraries in a very positive strategic direction over the longer term. The choice of Evergreen is also down to a number of factors: a) being honest there was a very limited amount of funding available, so much as we would have liked to do a broader study to include other LMS products like Koha it simply was not possible. b) Evergreen appears to be closer allied to a strategic direction including large consortial working than Koha does in current implementations (though I have no doubt at all as to Koha’s strengths & capabilities) – and this, I believe, will be an important factor for many UK libraries in the coming period. c) Evergreen is showing a significant amount of success and growth in the North American market (faster growth it seems than just about any other system, proprietary or open source), yet no-one in the UK has as yet committed to it.. we wanted to see if there was a good reason for this. d) Evergreen is probably the newest LMS system in terms of architecture & design on the market, and we believe is important to set a gauge as to how it measures up against the expectations we in the UK have for the functionality of an LMS system.. again this work has yet to be done for this market as without either a vendor presence or user community to promote the product, no means exists for it to happen.

…and that’s it, or at least all I’d want to put for a short ‘pitch’, though I would dearly love to go further and really explore some of the discussions around open source and the effects it could have on libraries… but no doubt there’ll be another time, and another forum for that to occur.

MERI SEP 24, 2010 12:25A.M. Minutes from our first ‘official’ team meeting:

MERI Meeting Minutes Time/Date: Friday 17th September Location: CW Meeting Room 2 Chair or Facilitator:

What’s will the project produce, what’s the benefit?

In terms of output, there is this blog, detailing the investigations we undertook into the product with some site visits & meetings in the USA and Canada earlier this year.We are also putting the newest version of Evergreen up against the UK Core Specification document and publishing the results in order that it can take a place on a level playing field to be matched against other products.In terms of longer term benefits, we aim to show that this product is at least able to match existing LMS products in terms of technical viability and functionality.

Note Taker: Charlotte Murray Apologies: Regina Ferguson Attendees: Angela Walker, Angela Dudley, James Allen, Charlotte Murray, Jenny McNally

If this viability can be shown, then the discussion about open source can

1. ERM system demos

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29 September 2010

7. Miscellaneous 1.1. Charlotte is arranging demos with ERM suppliers for 14th-15th and 21st-22nd October. Times etc are still to be finalised in some cases 1.2. For the Swetswise Webinar we’ve been struggling to find a suitable room. Charlotte to contact Training Team to see if they can help 1.3. Jenny to contact Colin Carter from Innovative Interfaces about speaking to him at the LMS Showcase in Manchester on Wed 22nd September 1.4. Charlotte to compile a basic list of requirements before the demos.

Please send any ideas for requirements/problems with current processes to Charlotte

7.1. Angela D asked to see the original project bid, blog etc in order to catch up on what has already been done 7.2. Charlotte and Angela W to meet to discuss progress including examples of requirements documents used in RFID project 7.3. The meeting on 1st October will be an extended meeting where we will look at the final drafts of flowcharts etc mapping our current processes

MERI 2. Contacting current ERM customers

SEP 23, 2010 08:56P.M.

2.1. Ongoing – so far we haven’t had any responses/feedback from current ERM users. Anyone who knows of an institution or contact please let Charlotte know 2.2. Angela W spoken to Andy Land and Nigel Kimber at Manchester who have created an in-house system and is looking into the possibility of a visit to see their system in action

Following on from the JISC LMS workshop on the 7th and 8th September, this post looks at why our project is important to the HE community. The first part of the project is basically unpicking all the different processes that are involved in the management of electronic resources. There is a wide range of processes in use including the use of spreadsheets, maunally checking items, and use of existing library business systems. We are then examining the commercial products on the market to see if they fulfill our Electronic Resource Management needs, along with meeting users of ERMs to discuss if the system they use fully meets their expcetations, and if they find that there are processes that they still have to carry out, outside of the ERM. Following this review, we will be producing a preliminary set of requirements which will look at an ERM system that can be used by other HEIs, we will also produce a case study examining the process we have gone through, and documenting our findings

3. Our current processes 3.1. Charlotte is working on flowcharts that map our current processes (Acquisitions, Licensing, Statistics and Access) and has spoken to all members of the team to get their input.

3.2. Charlotte is meeting with Kath Kellet and Dan Leach on Monday 20th Sept to discuss access for external borrowers etc as they have been working the Access Salford scheme. Will also chat to Anna Langley about maintenance of databases

JANUS - LEEDS MET JISC PROJECT

jiscjanus

4. Blog

SEP 23, 2010 10:55A.M. 4.1. Charlotte will post meeting minutes on the blog 4.2. Angela will write a post looking at the benefits of our project to the HE community 4.3. Any ideas/suggestions for items to include in the blog, please let Charlotte know

Why Jangle & Facebook ?

The Technologies for Learning team at Leeds Met has already done a small scale project in developing a Facebook application which exposes a limited amount of data from the Library Management System (the Sirsi Dynix platform, Symphony) into users’ Facebook accounts – on an optin basis. This was very much a local development, not currently transferable to other institutions’ implementation of the LMS. The uptake of this application has been sufficiently encouraging to suggest that there is an opportunity to extend this facility both in terms of functionality, and to other external service platforms.

5. JISC Project Manager 5.1. Ben Showers is our new project manager (replacing David Flanders) – Angela W has contacted him to invite him to one of our meetings.

6. Electronic resources Officer

Project outputs

6.1. Jo Willows will be starting this post next week and will be looking at licensing, statistics etc so will become involved in the project too

The outputs of the project use the open source connector framework, JANGLE, to create a specific connector to the Sirsi Dynix library management system. This is much more robust and extensible than the current in-house solution which is not ‘real time’, and the connector can

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be taken up and exploited by any other users of the Sirsi Dynix LMS. The team are also writing a JANGLE enabled Application for the Facebook social networking site, which will facilitate the exposure of further data from the Library Management system (OPAC, user account information) within Facebook, more than is achievable with the current methodology. This makes Library resources available beyond the Library web environment through embedding access to these in an external social web environment.

I don’t object to Glasgow as a venue, particularly. Having worked in Northern Ireland, I know that those who are involved in JISC projects from those parts of the UK distant from London face frequent and distant travel: in eighteen months based in Coleraine, I flew to England nine times. So it does seem only fair that occasional meetings should redress the balance somewhat by being held outside London and the south east of England. Even with decent bandwidth, JANET and Skype videoconferencing are no substitute for an actual meeting, either; but perhaps the future should be about virtual conferences, either using video or in virtual worlds such as Second Life.

Interest & use to the wider community As a development of an Open Source software application, the results of the project will be accessible to all members of the Sirsi Dynix user community, many of them higher education libraries (currently 41 UK HE institutions, JISC / SCONUL LMS Study 2008). This will allow them to deploy a version of the Leeds Met JANGLE Facebook App and any other available JANGLE Apps. This will open up the opportunity for others to write further JANGLE enabled applications, for example to other social networking sites. Additionally, as commercial providers write JANGLE connectors for their own products – for example, as has been done by the Talis Library Management System provider – then other LMS users from different vendors will be able to utilise and deploy the JANGLE Facebook App. The potential to ‘mix and match’ functionality from a range of platforms in order to offer optimal visibility and access to Library resources to the end-user is an end-product which will be of great value to the wider community.

Day 1 Each project was asked to provide a single powerpoint, as the basis for a three minute presentation as could be made to senior management. It was useful to see these, though I could have picked up more by looking at the project websites/blogs. (But I might not have done so if I hadn’t been forced to sit through them!) It was a pity I couldn’t get the WIFI to work - my netbook is short of space, so I hadn’t installed Java, needed to run the applet which allows authentication to the Glasgow University guest network. Why wasn’t there any support for Eduroam at the meeting, which would seeem a much better proposition for most of the delegates to this particular conference than Glasgow’s conference guest network?

(The answer, it appears, is that Glasgow isn’t an eduroam site.) It looked as though there was some lively chat on twitter, which I will need to look at later.

There was some interest in the locator, mainly questions about how we are handling the location discovery side (which is detailed here). We also came into a small amount of criticism, for apparently setting up requirements because they seemed interesting to us as developers rather than because they came from genuine user need. I suspect this is prompted by this blog post, about choosing to use latitude and longitude to identify a location; in our defence, we had to choose some sort of coordinate system, which could be independent between different maps on which the same location might be found; for this purpose, lat/long serves almost as well as any other (though it does suffer from the complication that latitude goes upwards on a map, while the y co-ordinate of a spot on a graphic increases downwards from the top). It was this choice which makes it possible for us to add in new features without any significant development cost, such as allowing the display of the map to link to Google map centred at the same location.

LIBRARY LOCATOR PROJECT

JISClms Programme Meeting 78 September 2010, Glasgow University SEP 21, 2010 12:08P.M. Before attending I was reluctant to attend the meeting, because it seemed to be too much: two full days for two of us, when the project itself lasts only six months and doesn’t employ either of us involved in it full time. And we don’t really fit into the groups suggested for discussion. John, being a busy local councillor, was unable to attend, but even so it seemed like a lot of time, particularly as Glasgow is not a convenient place to go from Cambridge where I am based, and as it clashed with the time I usually take my holidays. And I hate conferences, anyway. Like training sessions, they don’t usually offer much beyond poorly organised presentations and certainly are no substitute for the material available on the Internet. So perhaps I attended determined to feel that it wasn’t worth the effort.

It was also useful to renew acquaintances with several of the other participants, including some who have previously worked with us on projects, such as Dan Sheppard (from Caret in Cambridge and the FAR Project) and Owen Stephens (now a consultant, but formerly at RHUL and the ShibboLEAP Project).

The main event of the morning was the keynote, devliered by Lynn Silipigni Connaway from OCLC. This was interesting in its analysis of a lot of work over the last few years looking into how users regard libraries, coming to the conclusion that things are going to change and that academic libraries cannot wait until the current teenagers, with their familiarity with online tools going far beyond that of previous students,

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arrive before planning for this change. This was based on Lynn’s report available online, which I would urge those interested in the future of UK academic libraries to read.

aimed at senior managers, which will present the interoperability message, including the bad and good things noted on the first day.

Vendors will be invited, and should hope not to be embarrassed!

The catering for lunch was not wonderful, though of course the expectation was that most people were staying in the hotel and would have hot meals there. But it was perhaps a bit of a confirmation of the stereotype that Scotland is the home of unhealthy eating to have a choice of cakes and no fruit as a sweet, which is certainly unusual for this type of catering.

Lunch was followed by a series of surgeries. The purpose of these was to help refine the three minute project pitches from the first day into something which could really be used to explain the importance of a project to senior management. This was actually quite helpful, with critical questions from experienced experts to elicit more benefits oriented pitches: less about what the project does, more about what the project does for you. The pitches are then supposed to become a blog post, so I won’t repeat it here. The meeting then finished early, leaving me with an hour and a half to fill before the train I had booked a seat on left. So I hung around and continued to talk to people for a while, before finally catching the subway to Glasgow Central.

During the afternoon, we split into three groups, user experience, electronic resource management and open source. The locator project doesn’t neatly fit into any of these categories, so I joined the open source discussion, as the one most interesting to me personally. The focus here was on the possibility of UK HE institutions adopting open source LMS systems, something which, by the end of the afternoon, I felt seemed likely but only on a small scale (mainly because of lacking functionality in existing OSS candidates, in addition to the usual fears about large scale OSS software, such as support, risk and sustainability). since the UK community has some distinct requirements, and there is not yet a significant UK community around OSS LMS systems, such issues are unlikely to go away any time soon. My impression at the end of the day though I had to leave early - was that the outlook for open source LMS in the UK is pretty pessimistic.

Overall I ended up enjoying the conference more than I expected to beforehand.

Our project is perhaps an outlier in the programme, rather different from the others: it is more about development than integration, and this was why it was hard to fit into the groups on the afternoon of the first day and the morning of the second. The best parts of it were the opportunities to talk to people, and to establish some community ideas about issues such as the role of OSS in library IT.

The highlight of the day occurred on the trip back to the cottage near Penrith in which I was staying, as a kestrel stooped on the dual carriageway and landed about four feet away from me on the verge as I passed. Unfortunately, this trumps LMS and open source for me!

Did I take away anything that would really help with the project? No, I don’t really think so; our concerns are a little too different from most of the other projects. Were the discussions interesting? Yes, but they could have just as easily have taken place online, as far as I am concerned.

Whether the discussions would have happened online is another matter; the event provided the impetus needed for them to take place. To me, this impetus was more than was needed, a big effort for something which I would have done with less effort. But that is largely just my preference for online tools over meetings.

Day 2 A different venue (downstairs in the same building), but still no access to the WIFI. The morning session was about turning what was thought yesterday about OSS LMS into an event for later in the year. The tone seemed rather more optimistic, as the focus was on how to get the messages of some of the advantages of OSS which are applicable to LMS (as on the white board in the morning): competition is good, there is an ability to show rather than say, and that in the current climate, we need cost saving options. Added to this, the discussion identified the need for flexibility - libraries are starting to want to add community developed widgets and use open interfaces for delivery of information to wherever it is wanted - VLEs, Facebook, mobile apps, etc.

On the other hand, the conference was about community building, and it pretty much succeeded in this. So JISC should count it a success.

By the end of the discussion, the remit of the event under discussion had moved away from a discussion of OSS to interoperability and flexibility of this sort: the event will have the tag (better than a title nowadays!)

LibOpenEdge. It will be two days in January, one day for technicians, to look at some of the tools (OSS LMS, VUFind, etc) and then discuss the problems they have encountered (and the flip side, success stories) of trying to integrate data from diverse systems including the library. the style of the event would be mashedlib. This would be followed by a day

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COVENTRY UNIVERSITY PRIMO IMPLEMENTATION PROJECT

Once the application had been installed, there were four main thrusts to the implementation work: the design of the end-user interface, taking on board the feedback received as part of the usability study; the testing of data export / import routines from our existing systems (Aleph, MetaLib, SFX and the University’s repository product Equella); the establishing of automated data update routines and finally the installation / configuration of third party ancillary software products.

COVPRIMO one minute blog SEP 21, 2010 12:03P.M. At Coventry University we have been implementing Primo (which we are branding as ‘Locate’), Ex Libris’s next generation Library Catalogue.

The main driver behind launching a next generation OPAC was to provide a single user interface for staff and students to use as the starting point for all their Library searches, no matter what type of content they are looking for. This will help provide a more consistent user experience and improve the efficiency of information retrieval. This should help to increase the use of the Library’s e-resources. The new system should also help us to provide an attractive interface for our users to access quality information and we believe it will be a viable alternative to systems such as Google, Wikipedia, etc.

We were aware at the start of the project we had set ourselves an ambitious ‘go live’ date of early September, hoping to allow subject staff some time to prepare for the forthcoming student induction. In the event a decision has been taken to postpone the launch on two counts. Firstly Shibboleth configuration work is still incomplete and secondly Primo Central functionality is now scheduled to come on stream towards the end of October; Locate will be launched in the new year.

Our JISC project co-ordinator James Fisher leaves Coventry University on Friday 24 September 2010; we wish James well in his new post at the Univeristy of Warwick. Graham Daniels takes over as project contact following James’ departure.

The output from our JISC Project will be a report into our implementation of Primo, which should be useful for other institutions considering launching a next generation OPAC and particularly for those deciding to implement Primo themselves. The report will also include an overview of the usability testing we carried out as part of our implementation. This testing was carried out with staff and students to try to identify ways in which we can make our Primo more intuitive and user-friendly. We have then made changes to the system based on these tests. We also gained further student input via a focus group where we discussed what is the key information to include on the Primo home page and how should this be laid out.

UEAWOLFIE

Where we are going….

SEP 20, 2010 12:13P.M. Over the next few weeks, the wolfie projects will be doing the following tasks:

The general feedback we received about Primo was overwhelmingly positive, but we did identify issues which needed changes to be made, as they caused problems for several of the users involved in the testing. We have made numerous changes to the system already and we’re waiting on Ex Libris to resolve some support issues before making other changes.

We are also feeding back the resuts of our tests to Ex Libris and have been told that they will be taking these on board. We hope this means that where we discovered issues that cannot currently be changed Ex Libris will consider adding functionality that we require to future releases of Primo.

1. A use case of converting the “old” FBML Facebook Canvas Application over to the “new” IFrame-based Facebook Canvas Application. This will be a useful guide to anyone who also needs to do the changes before Facebook disable their FBML apps.

2. Update the UEA’s Blackboard widget to use the new API and featuring borrowed items, fines, renew item and top 5 books for course.

3. Documenting the code from the ueaWolfie project 4. Devise a competition for the UEA’s school of computing sciences to submit entries making make use of the ueaWolfie API.

Implementation notes Two IBM rack mounted servers [x3550 M2 8 core processing 16Gb RAM running Red Hat Linux 5.5 64 bit] were purchased and commissioned, one acting as a staging server, the other as the production server. In our case the supplier’s software installation was carried out on the production server initially with a copy made to staging fairly late on in the project - normally this procedure is reversed. Project management was handled through the supplier’s German office with conference calls established as and when required; these calls tended to increase in length and frequency the closer we moved towards our target switch-toproduction (STP) date. On-site staff training was carried out from Ex Libris’ UK office and was generally well received by staff.

5. Start work on the final project report!

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CAMBRIDGE LIBRARY WIDGETS

There are two reasons for using widgets for library services.

JISC LMS meeting in Glasgow

Number One: widgets make things happen in institutions with complex organisation and a tendency for long meetings and endless debate. That’s one of their main advantages. Development is in three parts. The information provider provides an API (as they see fit). The consumer provides a widget container (again, as they consider appropriate).

Neither of these two parts require extensive consultation. The final part, the widget itself, — which is the only part which ties the two parts together, — can be written in a day.

SEP 20, 2010 10:26A.M. Huw and I (Dan) went to Glasgow to the JISC LMS meeting.

So, if the joys of two nights spent catching sleep on the Caledonian Sleeper are the downside, what were the benefits?

Many actually. In three important ways.

Widgets are small (we’re talking person-hours or -days) and easily rewritten. This allows you to take risks in creating them. If some users have indicated that a widget might be useful, you can spend half a day creating one: much less time than it would take to perform a formal survey.

First, we heard a lot of ideas. We plan to implement a fair few of them in our project. For example, another JISC-funded project, ConnectedWorks, has led to us investigating a browser plugin called iCite. When someone mentioned the idea of adding a “find in my library” button to amazon searches, we realised we had just the tool for the job.

So we’re going to add a web-assistant browse widget to the project. There were many other examples, some we will have time to do, others will have to wait for future projects.

Think of how many projects there have been at your institution concerning integration of various computer systems. Think, nationally, how many projects there have been to integrate just catalogue and circulation information between VLEs with LMSes. Consider their budgets. We have such functionality already, in production, against our enterprise sites, in use by academics and students, as a result of a small project. And that’s just one widget.

Secondly, we learnt about other projects in the programme, including projects we could work with. The Wolfie project at UEA is a standout there, as is us using some of LSE’s earlier work. Generally, lots of good networking went on.

Number Two: as a user, widgets allow you to do things “from where you are”. There’s no “that’s in another system” issues. A user can, effectively, design their own screens to fit the way they work. No need to login again (auth permitting), or remember the URL or navigating to the page you want from the front page of a particular site. A screen of widgets might contain some parts derived from the LMS, some from the VLE, some from teacher-provided data (such as reading lists), and so on.

Finally, we were helped to develop our arguments and pitches for our projects, to help us describe them to each other, and the various people who might be able to help us in their execution.

There was also some excellent discussion around UX, and how we might be better at pooling the outputs of our user research (to avoid duplicating effort) and be better critical consumers of UX research (we all know how much poor-quality UX research is there: how do we wind the diamonds amongst the glass?).

Many of these containers (for example, in a VLE) have rich knowledge of the current user, too. That means that you can present “zero-click” search results, for example for exam papers: no need even to search for them because the results displayed by default are usually what the user is after. Both of these mean that they spend more time interacting with the real content, less time navigating.

CAMBRIDGE LIBRARY WIDGETS

One Minute Pitch SEP 20, 2010 10:15A.M.

Both of these things excite us, and present an opportunity to improve the way we do things and make what we offer to students more compelling.

One of the requests which came out of the JISC LMS meeting was that we prepare a one minute pitch for our projects. (Commonly known as “elevator pitches”. The idiosyncratic lift at the venue was very much the ghost at the feast on the first day of the meeting, having a tendency to steal the limelight by appearing on our floor unbidden and aimlessly chomping away with its doors throughout proceedings But, anyway,...).

So we’re producing example APIs and Widgets as might be used at other institutions, along with guidance of how to do so. We’re putting our money where our mouth is by developing at least half a dozen widgets we anticipate being useful to students and academics (some of them have been repeatedly explicitly requested, some others are widget-ising of existing useful functionality), and writing up how you can go about it at other institutions.

Often, the biggest obstacle to overcome when explaining widgets is to overcome the frivolity associated with the concept: the silly name; their ubiquitous use on social networking sites for producing pointless distractions, and so on. We encourage you to set such preconceptions aside, at least temporarily.

So, we’d particularly recommend this approach to institutions which have struggled, technically or socially, with integration in the past, and where the students are faced with a confusing array of different systems to use, as widgets can help with both of these.

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Undergraduate 1st |2nd |3rd | 4th | 5th year| Masters/ Postgraduate | PhD

Despite their silly name.

What is your program of study?

RESEARCHING USABILITY

SEP 17, 2010 11:35A.M.

What of the following online services do you use when searching for information and roughly how many hours a week do you spend on each?

Now that the usability testing has been concluded, it seemed an appropriate time to evaluate our recruitment process and reflect on what we learned. Hopefully this will provide useful pointers to anyone looking to recruit for their own usability study.

Classic catalogue | Aquabrowser catalogue | Searcher | Ejournals | My Ed | Pub Med | Web of Knowledge/Science | National Library of Scotland | Google Books | Google Scholar | Google | Wikipedia

Recruiting personas

How many hours a week do you spend using them?

As stated in the AquabrowserUX project proposal (Objective 3), the personas that were developed would help in recruiting representative users for the usability tests. Having learned some lessons from the persona interview recruitment, I made a few changes to the screener and added a some new questions. The screener questions can be seen below.

The main changes included additional digital services consulted when seeking information such as Google|Google Books|Google Scholar|Wikipedia|National Library of Scotland and an open question asking students to describe how they search for information such as books or journals online. The additional options reflected the wider range of services students consult as part of their study. The persona interviews demonstrated that these are not limited to university services.

The open question had two purposes; firstly it was able to collect valuable details from students in their own words which helped to identify which persona or personas the participant fitted. Secondly it went some way to revealing how good the participant’s written English was and potentially how talkative they are likely to be in the session.

Although this is no substitute for telephone screening, it certainly helped and we found that every participant we recruited was able to talk comfortably during the test. As recruitment was being done by myself and not outsourced to a 3rd person, this seemed the easiest solution at the time.

Never|1-3 hours|4-10 hours|More than 10 hours

lorraine_p

How much time per week do you spend in any of Edinburgh University libraries?

Never|1-3 hours|4-10 hours|More than 10 hours Tell me about the way you search for information such as books or journals online?

Things we learned There were a number of things that we would recommend to do when recruiting participants which I’ve listed below: 1. Finalise recruitment by telephone, not email. Not surprisingly, I found that it’s better to finalise recruitment by telephone once you have received a completed screener. It is quicker to recruit this way as you can determine a suitable slot and confirm a participant’s attendance within a few minutes rather than waiting days for a confirmation email. It also provides insight into how comfortable the respondent is when speaking to a stranger which will affect the success of your testing.

When recruiting personas the main things I was looking for was the user’s information seeking behaviour and habits. I wanted to know what users typically do when looking for information online and the services they habitually use to help. The questions in the screener were designed to identify these things while also differentiate respondents into one type of (but not always exclusive) persona.

2. Screen out anyone with a psychology background. It is something of an accepted norm amongst professional recruitment agencies but something which I forgot to include in the screener. In the end I only recruited one PhD student with a Masters in psychology, so did not prove much of a problem in this study. Often these individuals do not carry out tasks in the way they would normally do, instead examining the task and often trying to beat it.

This invariably can provide inaccurate results which aren’t always useful.

Screener Questions The user research will be taking place over a number of dates.

Please specify all the dates you will be available if selected to take part

3. Beware of participants who only want to participate to get the incentive. They will often answer the screener questions in a way they think will ensure selection and not honestly. We had one respondent who stated that they used every website listed more than 10 hours a week (the maximum value provided). It

26th August |27th August | 13th September | 14th September What do you do at the university?

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immediately raised flags and consequently that person was not recruited.

4. Be prepared for the odd wrong answer. On occasion, we found out during the session that something the participant said they had used in the past they hadn’t seen before and vice versa.

This was particularly tricky because often students aren’t aware of Aquabrowser by name and are therefore unable to accurately describe their use of it.

Useful resources For more information on recruiting better research participants check out the article by Jim Ross on UX Matters: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2010/07/recruiting-betterresearch-participants.php. There is also a similarly useful article by Abhay Rautela on Cone Trees with tips on conducting your own DIY recruitment for usability testing: http://www.conetrees.com/2009/02/articles/tips-for-effective-diyparticipant-recruitment-for-usability-testing/.

Have I missed anything? If there is something I’ve not covered here please feel free to leave a comment and I’ll make sure I respond. Thanks

SUMMON 4 HN

Getting ready for the new academic year SEP 17, 2010 07:03A.M. Some quick photos of our new Summon publicity as we gear up for welcome weekend and the new term

I’m sure the ‘official’ pictures will look far more professional!

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UEAWOLFIE

YOCALCAT’S JISC LMS BLOG

Recent Progress

yocalcat

SEP 15, 2010 09:10A.M.

SEP 14, 2010 09:50A.M.

1. Authenticating Facebook accounts against local accounts.

York St John University is implementing OCLC WorldCat Local as its resource discovery interface to the existing SirsiDynix Symphony OPAC.

We created a simple authentication system that has a database table of “local” system user accounts (i.e. simulating the active directory database). We then added functionality to authenticate and associate these user accounts with accounts on Facebook.

Why did we choose it? To enhance the student experience by making the library catalogue easier to search, so that items are more easily located, to give a more “Google-like” approach to searching, whilst at the same time providing a more advanced search experience if required. Low NSS scores meant we had to do something to encourage easier access to library resources. We looked at the other resource discovery options but couldn’t afford them; WorldCat Local is delivered on a subscription basis with an initial implementation fee and was therefore more affordable for us, as a small institution, and can currently be funded from the existing library budget. As a tool for librarians WorldCat and OCLC generally have a good reputation, so we did not want to lose the value we have had from WorldCat over the years, which was also potentially under threat because of limits on database budgets.

2. Built a basic Secure Token Service for exchanging OAuth tokens for WS Trust tokens.

How did the implementation go? As the first UK implementation of OCLC WorldCat Local we expected, and have had, a great deal of support from OCLC. However, we hadn’t anticipated the level of technical knowledge required to extract and then re-input data into the existing system, for which we couldn’t use the “canned” approaches provided by the system, in order to allow the Z39.50 interface to work. Support came from the WorldCat Local community on that issue. Integrity of data is another issue – some of our data couldn’t be loaded into WorldCat because MARC fields were missing so several passes had to be made to load the data. We are still tidying up data! Acquisitions and cataloguing workflows have changed as a result of becoming WorldCat members and cataloguing through the OCLC Connexions interface. There were some issues with how the OCLC algorithm presents the data, particularly with display of recent editions and FRBR-isation and a solution is still being sought.

3. Integrated (in an almost fudgy way) the STS with the existing web service Added parameters to the web service so that it is passed the OAuth token and a unique system ID. The web service then authenticates this token against the respective system.

4. Updated Facebook app to use the OAuth token

Do the students like it? Yes, indications from usability tests carried out over the summer are that they do, although not all results have been analysed yet. We’ll report more on that in the final case study. Most have commented that it is easier to search. Some of the librarians are not so sure, however, and feel it is more difficult to get at precise information. Maybe they are taking the librarian’s view rather than seeing things from the users’ angle. Most users don’t care how they get to the information, so long as they get it.

As the title suggests, we integrated the STS with the Facebook app so that it authenticates using the OAuth tokens.

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RESEARCHING USABILITY

sandra SEP 09, 2010 08:22A.M. In this final part of the persona creation series I will introduce the personas we created and discuss how we plan to keep the personas relevant and current. As mentioned in the previous blog, we created 4 personas based on our interviews. These personas were:

Sandra, the search specialist Full details of each persona can now be viewed on the project wiki. It is also possible to download a Word version of the personas from the Wiki if required.

Looking at the full personas in the wiki, there a few features of them worth mentioning: • We decided to recreate some of the scales we used when segmenting the groups. We felt that this provided a quick snapshot of the persona in addition to the more descriptive background which hopefully brought the persona to life.

• We used photos from iStockphoto.com and http://www.sxc.hu/ • In addition to background and demographic information we also added sections including Personal Goals, Frustration & Pain Points, Typical Tasks and Information Seeking Behaviour. These were based on the categories we used when writing summaries for each participant.

• We tried to create an alliteration of the persona’s name and their characteristic behaviour to make them more memorable e.g. Pete the progressive browser

Pete, the progressive browser Badaal, the search butterfly Eve, the e-book reader

Dissemination and future-proofing personas In addition to publicising the personas through the blogging streams (WordPress and twitter), we have tried where possible to include as much raw data and project documentation as possible on the project wiki. As mentioned in part 1, we had difficulty recruiting staff and consequently were unable to create a persona which represented them. If it’s possible to conduct interviews with University staff members in future projects, an additional persona for staff could be added to the collection. By providing as much raw data as possible in addition to full explanations of the methods used, it should be possible for other groups to create their own personas using the same template.

During this year’s UPA Conference in Munich a presentation on mobile personas highlighted the importance of making them forward thinking.

The presentation discussed the dangers of personas becoming outdated and the consequences of this on product design. This is not just

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important in mobile design, outdated personas are potentially dangerous and could have a negative rather than positive impact on a project. Tom Allison presents a number of ways that personas can become outdated or ‘Zombies’ in his excellent presentation, UX in the Real World: There’s no such thing as “No Persona” (see descriptions below). Reflecting on the process we have taken to create our personas, I am confident that our personas are not zombies, however that is not to say that they cannot ‘be turned’ in the future. To guard against this possibility it is important to encourage others to continue the work, adding more interviews and details appropriate to their work in order to make them appropriate. In our project we were interested in the persona’s attitude to UoE Aquabrowser and Voyager catalogues. However, the information seeking behaviour of each persona is much more general and has the potential to be used as a basis for other academic library use-cases. Providing a thorough account of how the personas were created should hopefully make it easier for others to create their own set of system-specific personas.

impression of them.

Stupid User Personas: These are perhaps the hardiest of the zombie personas. If personas are built or even just thought about and kept out of the “light of collaborative day” – that is, are not shared and publicized widely and integrated into every stage of a process – then they tend toward negative or dismissive models of the end-user. Teams whose only access to the end-user is a combination of direct communication, interruption and negative feedback to their delivered product are very likely to cultivate these personas in the absence of “good personas”.

Conclusions and reflections It’s difficult to be subjective when evaluating the success of personas you were involved in creating, particularly because the personas have only just been created. Feedback from others will hopefully provide one way to measure their success. The realism and believability of the personas is important and something I believe we have managed to achieve but I am always interested to know if others agree and if there are any improvements we could make. Having spent a little time working with some* of the personas to recruit participants for the usability testing of Work package 3 (Objective 3) I have made some observations:

Descriptions of the different types of Zombie Personas by Tom Allison: Mirror Personas: These are the end-user models that get used in the absence of any other reference or description.

Anyone on the project team that needs to make a design decision simply asks themselves what they would want in that situation (i.e., they metaphorically look in the mirror).

Usually that is not a very good reflection of what the targeted end-user would actually want. Often the difference in these two perspectives can render a result anywhere from terribly frustrating to completely useless to the eventual end-users.

There are not huge differences between Baadal and Eve. The differentiating factors are the consumption of digital resources (e.g ebooks) and use of the University digital libraries. On many other scales they are the same or very similar. This has made it a little trickier to recruit to each persona as often the details provided by willing participants makes them difficult to categorise as one or the other. This evidence provides a compelling argument that these personas could be merged. However, there is also an argument that participants do not have to fit neatly into one persona or another. For the purpose of the project we will continue to use three individual personas. It will be possible to evaluate the success of the personas over the course of time.

Undead Personas: These are personas that were in fact constructed at one point in a project but that are no longer truly “alive” to the project. They may be hanging on the design team’s wall, or sitting in a report somewhere online or in a drawer. They exist (that’s the “undead” part), but they exert none of the positive effects that a “good persona” can.

They may be the worst sort of persona in that they give the team the false confidence that they have “done personas” and they are probably most responsible for the bad reputation that personas sometimes have – in that, the team “did personas” but “it was a waste of time” because they did not keep them alive to the overall process in order to reap the benefits of their work.

* Findings from the interviews led to the decision to test with students as these are the primary target audience for UoE Aquabrowser.

Consequently we used personas Pete, Badaal and Eve in recruitment.

Unicorn/Frankenstein Personas: These are personas dreamed up or slapped together from pre-existing parts by someone in the project team. Regardless of how they are used, the signal they give is not a true one. They no more reflect the actual end-user than the programmers mirror persona does and team members who understand that they are based on nothing more than someone’s imagination tend to resent them rather than view them as a resource. The don’t work like good personas and they are resented by those in the know. These along with their undead brethren lead to many with limited experience with personas to have a negative

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SWWHEP LIBRARIES SHARED RESOURCE DISCOVERY We then gave a quick overview of what to expect from the rest of the session. We also showed the group what the Coventry Primo currently looks like and did a quick demo of a search. We had some immediate positive feedback at this point about the look of the Primo interface. It was described by one user as “very easy on the eye.” Then we told them about the usability studies that had already taken place, and highlighted one of the changes that we had made because of these studies.

iFind Discover in “live Beta” SEP 06, 2010 07:07A.M. iFind Discover went into “live beta” at Swansea University last week! It now appears in place of Voyager on library OPACs and links from the library home page, although there is still a link back to the “classic catalogue” for those who want it.

We then asked the participants to suggest as many ideas as they could think of that they would like to see on the home page. The list of suggestions that the group came up with and agreed would be useful on the home page was as follows:

There has been a good flow of feedback – mostly positive and constructive – and Luke has been dealing with issues as they arise. We are in the process of doing a new full dataload, with tweaked parameters, which should resolve some questions from users.

· Announcements (e.g. work going on in the Library at the moment) · Room booking / availability · Search hints, tips / Search examples · Introduction to Primo – Tutorial · Contacts, Profiles, Who’s Who, Who’s responsible for certain subject areas · Advertising for the University as a whole – Student Centre, Social Events, etc. · Opening times · Advanced Search · Contact IT Services for help with your password, or with signing in · Feedback section for Primo or for anything to do with the Library · Ask a Librarian · Latest books added to Library stock in different subject areas · Passwords help, change password information · Image of the Library (maybe as a watermark with links on top) · A video with search hints · Autocomplete functionality when typing searches · Link to the Centre for Academic Writing & referencing information · Library FAQs · CU Portal link · CUOnline / Moodle link

Although the SWWHEP project team is still working on improvements and fixes, first-line support is now being handled by Swansea University’s library systems team.

Paul

COVENTRY UNIVERSITY PRIMO IMPLEMENTATION PROJECT

Focus Group - Primo Home Page SEP 06, 2010 06:29A.M. In order to get student feedback about what information should be on our Primo home page and the layout of the home page we arranged a focus group with ten students at the end of August. To get our participants we first emailed all of our volunteers who had given us their email addresses back in June. We had a much lower response rate than when we were arranging the usability tests. So to get more participants we went round the Library asking students if they would be available to come along to our group. We soon reached our target of ten students, and were very pleased that they all turned up at the appointed time.

We then wrote each of the suggestions on post-its and worked on a flipchart with a hand drawn version of the Primo home page. This had five areas on it. These were the header area which includes the search box, and the footer area. These two areas will remain fixed as users carry out searches. The rest of the home page is divided into three parts: a top left and top right section and a bottom section which goes across the whole page. The group suggested whereabouts on the home page was the best place to put each of their suggestions. There was quite a bit of debate around where was the best place to put each suggestion and some ideas were even rejected and removed from the list. In the end a consensus was reached with similar items being grouped together.

The session was extremely productive with all the students contributing and lots of ideas being discussed. To start the session the three members of Library staff introduced themselves and then the ten students did the same and told the group what they were studying. To get everyone warmed up we asked them to tell us what they do first of all when they get an assignment and have to find relevant information. This produced a lively discussion and despite a number of students using Wikipedia and Google it was reassuring to find that everyone made use of the Library’s subscribed resources too and most seemed to use MetaLib to get to the databases. There was a quick debate around the pros and cons of Wikipedia. Most students agreed that they shouldn’t reference it and many had been given strict instructions about this by their lecturers.

However, a number of students found it a useful starting point and used it to find search terms about their topic to enter into the Library databases. This was an interesting aside and seemed to get everyone involved from the very start of the session.

It was suggested that Announcements could appear in a ‘ticker’ format scrolling across the screen. This was something to look at in the future.

There was a big debate around where on the page they should appear. It was agreed this should be limited to just Library announcements, and nothing else, and maybe just the top few announcements and headlines only to keep it brief. Eventually it was agreed that links to

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announcements could go on the top right of the page, along with new books added to stock and room bookings information.

the page if we included this.

Revisiting the mock-up of the home page it was again agreed to keep similar items grouped together but where possible to just display a general heading which you can click on in order to display the links beneath that heading. A picture of the final mock-up can be seen below:

Search hints should be at the top on the left under the search box. Also a short introduction to Primo should be here and possibly also a link to a video introduction, which is something else to look at in the future. An Ask a Librarian link should be in this area too. There was agreement to add a link to the text at the end of the search hints.

The Ask a Librarian link should also be in the header, so it is always available. The header and footer stay on the screen when a search is carried out, so would always be available, whereas the rest of the home page would be replaced by search results, etc. There was also consensus that a link to Library Passwords information should be in this section.

Contact information for Subject Librarians could go in the footer as this is a common place to find contacts. Links to IT Services & general ITS Passwords information could also go in this section, along with Library FAQs. There was discussion over where to put the link to the student portal (CU Portal). Suggestions were to put this in the footer, but also to put a link to this at the top of the screen. Eventually we agreed to make the Coventry University logo at the top of the screen a link to CU Portal as this is the most likely place you would want to link to from Primo and also put another link in the footer.

One other point of interest that was raised several times during the session was the expectation of personalised information for individual users. Participants wanted information about previous searches, books that they have looked for or used before and new books in the Library relevant to their subject. We explained that much of this information is available in the area that we have named ‘My Favourites’. We didn’t go into too much more detail about this as we were focussing on the home page for all users, initially accessing it as a guest. However, it was clear that personalisation was something that should be looked at further in the future.

It was suggested that the opening hours could go in the bottom section of the home page along with links to the Centre for Academic Writing and referencing.

The group thought it would be good if an image of the Library could be included on the page, possibly as a watermark. However, it was agreed that this should only be added if it didn’t distract users from the text on the home page.

Overall it was an incredibly useful session. We will now sit down with the Library Systems Manager who is working on these kinds of developments in Primo and try to turn the comments into reality.

We then looked at three other Primo Version 3 home pages, that are already live, and the group gave us input into what they liked and didn’t like about these sites.

After looking at the other sites it was agreed that the amount of text on the Coventry Primo home page should be kept to a minimum. One comment was “The simpler the better.” Ideally, the group wanted headings in bold that you could click on to make the information beneath those headers display. This would mean that initially there would just be headings on the page, which would prevent it from being too cluttered.

However, it needs to be clear that this is what will happen if you click on the heading. The information also needs to be spread out enough to fill the screen.

The group also commented that the out-of-the-box image of books on a shelf, that displays on several Primo sites really drew the eye. However, this was probably the least important thing on the page. They still felt it could be good to include a watermarked image of our Library. However, we would need to be careful this didn’t detract from the information on

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR b.showers@jisc.ac.uk

29 September 2010

CAMBRIDGE LIBRARY WIDGETS

researcher as they searched. None of the volunteers were particularly keen on being filmed, so voice only recording was used supplemented by the researcher’s back up notes. As the intention is to use e-Search as a one stop library portal as well, the volunteers were also asked to prioritise key information on learning resources and network services and make their own suggestions as to additional useful information.

They were also asked which format they would prefer this information to be available in i.e. text, podcast, video etc.

Back to school, off to Glasgow SEP 06, 2010 06:09A.M. After a typically fragmented August (if you’re not on holiday yourself then everyone you need to speak to is) it’s back to school for the CULWidgets team, starting with a trip to Glasgow for the JISC LMS Programme Meeting. As we draw slowly towards the end of the project it’s a great opportunity to focus on what we’ve achieved and what we still need to achieve as well as a chance to see what everyone else is doing!

COVENTRY UNIVERSITY PRIMO IMPLEMENTATION PROJECT

Usability Testing Primo

One thing we have made progress with over the Summer is getting the student data we need to give our widget services relevance. We have one minor technical hitch to get over, and then we should be able to get a test version of our Exam Papers Widget up and running.

SEP 03, 2010 08:35A.M. About a month ago we carried out our usability tests on the out-of-thebox version of Primo. This had been set up to use data from our Aleph Library Management System test server. We also had data from MetaLib, our Federated Search Tool and SFX our Open URL Resolver harvested into Primo. We wanted to get input from staff and students on things that they found unintuitive, so that we could try to make improvements to the system before launching it.

This really is a key strand of the project for us. It involves institutional collaboration - the University Library, CARET, DSpace@Cambridge (institutional repository) and the Management Information Services Division (who run the student registry) are all integral to the project. It involves a new kind of material - the Library has traditionally only dealt with exam papers in paper form. It involves the provision of relevant services in relevant places. And it involves direct engagement with the student and academic community. Finally, we hope it will be a blueprint for the course-based delivery of teaching and learning materials across the University.

Before starting testing we visited the University’s usability lab and talked things through with the technician. We also enlisted the help of an experienced usability tester, a PhD student from the University who had spent a lot of time running tests as part of her research. She gave us plenty of helpful advice and even attended our pilot study to give us feedback on ways to improve our test before running it with students and academic staff.

ESEARCH BLOG

Usability Study

We ran the pilot study using a member of Library staff who had not seen our Primo installation at all, so had no preconceptions. Carrying out this pilot enabled us to familiarise ourselves with the environment in the usability lab and also to check that our questions all seemed to work and make sense to the tester. We did identify some changes to make to the questions before carrying out the testing for real.

SEP 06, 2010 05:06A.M. The main focus of this project for us has been the usability study. User testing of the beta version of e-Search began in May with four groups of HE students. The groups were chosen to provide a cross section of the student profile across campuses. Full time degree students from the School of Art & Design represented the more traditional degree profile with students often joining courses direct from school. These students usually have a good level of IT literacy. Foundation Degree Early Years students represented the ‘non-traditional’ student, of which there are a large number at the college. These are mature returners to education, in this case mainly 30+ females, often less confident with IT skills. HND/HNC Construction students are again mature returners but mainly male and, finally, National Certificate Nautical Science from the School of Maritime Studies on placement at sea for quite long periods and therefore needing access to resources as distance learners.

We recruited 8 students and 2 members of academic staff to carry out the usability tests. We had obtained about 40 students’ contact details earlier in the project when carrying out a survey on what to call our Primo. This meant we were able to send emails to the volunteers with the incentive of paying for their time if they came in and worked with us.

Although it was an unfortunate time to carry out the tests right in the middle of the summer vacation we still managed to recruit our 8 students without too many problems. Unsurprisingly we didn’t receive responses from a number of emails, but we were able to continue sending out requests until we had enough volunteers. Pleasingly, although we had to rearrange a couple of the tests at the request of the students everyone who volunteered did attend and arrived on time. The members of staff that we recruited were regular Library users who were suggested by the Subject Librarians who knew them.

We used ‘think aloud’ protocol for the sessions. Before each session the students were asked to stream themselves as ‘Very Confident’, ‘Confident’ or ‘Not Confident’ from the point of view of online searching skills. They were then asked to perform a range of search tasks to explore the full functionality of the software describing their actions to the

We allowed an hour to carry out each test and to have a discussion afterwards and found that a number of different themes emerged, which

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR b.showers@jisc.ac.uk

29 September 2010

helped us identify changes we wanted to make in order to make the system more user-friendly. Firstly there were things to do with the appearance of the interface, which we felt could be changed to make it more intuitive. For example, after carrying out a search the facets available to refine that search are displayed in a column on the left-handside of the screen. However, there is not much differentiation between these facets and the search results that display in the centre of the screen. Everything is shown on the same white background and there is only a faint line between the facets and the results. This meant that a number of our testers didn’t spot the facets for quite some time. Once they did spot them they did understand what they were for and used them intuitively to narrow down their search. We had a number of pleasing comments about how obvious it was what the facets did and also comparisons with Tesco Online and Amazon in the way that they worked. This showed how important it is to make the facets prominent to the users as they did find them useful once they noticed them. Therefore, in order to try to make them stand out more we added shading to the facets to differentiate them from the rest of the page and made the headings bolder. We also made the line between the facets and the results more defined. We believe this will make the facets easier to spot.

Most of the changes that we identified through the usability tests could be put into one or more of these categories. Since the tests both Paul here in the Library and Lee from Ex Libris have been working very hard to configure our Primo based on the results. It has already changed a great deal, but there is still more work to do. We have a consultancy day with Ex Libris here at Coventry next week, so we are hoping that we will be able to clear up many of the outstanding issues then.

The second theme that emerged was to do with terminology that was used. An example of this is that the personalised area of Primo where users can save search results or previous searches, etc. was originally called the e-Shelf. We had a number of testers who thought that this would be where they would find e-books, which does have a certain logic to it: An e-book would be on an e-Shelf. Several other testers were also confused by the terminology and kept returning to this area, even though it wasn’t relevant to any of the tasks they have been set. Therefore, in order to try to avoid this confusion we have renamed the e-Shelf as ‘My Favourites’ as we believe this is clearer.

Another theme that emerged was to do with the functionality of Primo.

For example when Primo finds multiple editions of an item it groups them all together under the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) rules. However, when searching by relevance it always prioritises the online version, even if this isn’t the most recent. In our experience with e-books, publishers often only make an electronic version of a title available some time after they have published the print version. This delay can be 6 months or it could be a year or more. This means that we often have new print editions of essential books available in the Library well before we are able to obtain an electronic version. We will often have previous print and electronic editions. This means that when Primo groups these records into a FRBR group the edition it chooses to display in the list of search results is the old electronic edition.

The user won’t find out that we hold the most recent edition until they click on the FRBR group and examine the list of other available editions.

When we asked Ex Libris if we could continue to search by relevance but make sure that the most recent edition of a book displays in the results list we were told this wasn’t standard functionality. Therefore, we had to raise a call to get our request investigated further and it’s possible that we won’t be able to make this change until a future version of Primo is released. We are waiting in hope for Ex Libris to investigate our request as we would like to make this change before we go live with Primo.

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