Where’s my stuff? A First Attempt at a Multi-supplier “My Account” Area By Allen Jones (Director, Digital Library and Technical Services, The New School) <jonesa@newschool.edu>
W
hen library discovery systems directly link to materials, the user experience can facilitate research in some truly amazing ways — whether it’s owned material or material housed in evidence-based or demand-driven collections. However, when materials are not readily available or library intervention is required, the discovery service can launch patrons into a myriad of acquisition, interlibrary lending, and fulfillment web forms that are difficult to navigate at best. If you want a book or a physical item, check our consortial lending service (usually with some ironic name like EZBorrow, BorrowDirect, UBorrow, TexShare, etc.). If an available copy isn’t in that system, users may recommend an item for purchase in the collection or search a union catalog such as WorldCat to make the request in the library’s interlibrary lending service. Unfortunately, the experience of requesting articles and book chapters is no better. If the required citation or content is not in the full-text subscriptions of the library, patrons may be directed to an external web form to fill out a page for their article/book chapter of interest. If they are lucky, an OpenURL will populate the fields of that form so users do not have to cut and paste values into the search form. If such a link does not exist, users must
resort to manually entering citation information into the fields of the request form, frequently leaving out identifying information such as serial and book identifiers like ISSN and ISBNs. At The New School libraries, five different web forms exist to request materials: recommend a purchase, the Relais D2D EZBorrow catalog (later ReShare), the ILLiad-based interlibrary loan request forms, links or widgets from libguides, and links from WorldCat. Having too many different methods to perform the same website task has been found to increase cognitive load, make your site harder to learn, and ultimately lead to user frustration (Wong, E., https://www.interaction-design.org/ literature/article/user-interface-design-guidelines-10-rulesof-thumb). In Jakob Nielsen’s seminal article on the ten usability heuristics, the author emphasizes two key heuristics that highlight major sources of frustration for website users. First, our patrons use other Internet sites more than they use our discovery service. To the extent that library systems follow navigational conventions and outcomes followed by other online services (called natural mapping), it’s easier for users to have a positive, consistent experience with the interface because it
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Against the Grain / April 2022
<https://www.charleston-hub.com/media/atg/>
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