Removing complexity
libdev talks about the complexity of opacs and warns us that this could increase with library 2.0. Indeed. has anybody looked at worldcat lately? There are so many bells and whistles that it is easy to get lost. I once even found that I had somehow managed to move from WorldCat to ArticleFirst without realising it, after puzzling over the way the book display had changed.
Complexity is also one of the reasons why we need a platform to build these library 2.0 apps. Several years ago, when I was doing my first degree, I found the plethora of systems that were available to me to be so daunting that I would put off doing my research. It wasn’t until someone had held my hand, and lead me into the maze that I was able to see that it wasn’t such a bad place. It was still complicated and sometimes confusing, but I could always ask the librarian.
Now with library 2.0 we have an oppourtunity to hold the users hand with a new medium. we can design an interface based on our platform that starts simple, growing more complex as the user’s demands grow more complex. In the background our system can search other resources that the user did not know existed and then, along with a basic set of results from the users own catalogue (the ones the user is expecting), we can say “Oh, did you know that there are some items that may be of interest in these databases too. Infact there are 42 records in this one, click here and we’ll go there.” We can then begin to show our users that there is more to searching than the local catalogue.
Google does this already. If you use the search button to fire the search, you get a “tip” at the top of the page, reminding you that you can just hit enter.
There is no reason why our opacs need to stick to the card-file-list-of-results format. We can use our information nouse to lead the user into the search process, and then lead them out the other side. Rather than just dumping them in a deluge of information, we can add pointers to say why we think that information is relevent for them.
An example. A users searches for political parties in rumania. As well as local books that come under related headings, we also show a box that says “did you know that these (listed) databases contain political abstracts of journal articles, would you like to search them now?” This is far more helpful than having to go into metalib (not part of the library’s opac) and search for databases, and then decide which ones may be useful, and then do the search that we originally did in the library opac. We remove this complexity, and provide the user with a visible option through the library opac that they are comfortable with, meeting the need of the user where they are, not where we think they ought to be.
Technorati Tags: Library 2.0 , OPAC, library catalogue, complexity, search process, user needs