Information Takes Over

LibrarianInBlack: Discussion re: libraries and the long tail
Our library catalog has a big red button on all of its pages (initial, search results, etc.) to our area cooperative borrowing system that people can use for free if they don’t find what they need in our catalog. But you would not belive how many people have no idea that this service is here–when I show it to them, they’re shocked.

It is demonstratable that one of the fundamental problems with our library opacs is that the basic vendor supplied product is hard to modify. New twiddly bits such as LiB’s ‘big red button’, are added, but not in the optimal place.

When no results are found, a search should be automatically fired off to SuperSearch and the results displayed, in the user’s current searching session.

LiB’s catalogue could have a Google style sponsored listing, highlighted in a different colour perhaps, that showed three matches from SuperSearch, and the small print “try a search here”.

Or maybe, a hint similar to google’s “just press enter on your keyboard”. Google do these things for a reason, not because they are better than librarians [debate, debate], but because they understand how to lead users into services that they may or may not know about.

All those “try this search in Google books” and “look what we found in the news” sections are alerting the user to the possibilities. They are successful because they put the information in the way of the user. The user is looking for search results to see if you have a book on their topic, or a particular title. Those search results appear in a standard way in any search system, so we need to put our extra service information there, where the user can see it. e.g. Have you tried searching for electronic journals? we found these 3 that look relevent to your search

The possibilities for flagging lesser used services in this way are endless. But they do require the functionality to be there in the opac. Or more preffereably, the underlying platform to the opac needs to be able to incorporate these things which are by definition twiddly bits desired by individual libraries. We need an API, a plugin architecture (take wordpress as an example), and a templating system. It is no good asking a vendor to provide a one size fits all solution, but a one system can be used in many ways solution.

S.F.X is another candidate for this approach, please, how many of your users know what S.F.X stands for? just show them the details under a search result. Show an icon with text that means Full Text, or View Abstract, or ILL this item. When I looked up S.F.X. to see what the letters stood for, I found that it means Special Effects. Now in what way does that equate to “there may be other ways to get hold of this item, click here”

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