It's a month since the launch of the Resource Discovery Forum and a good time to summarise what we've been up to. After an introduction and welcome by Tracey Clarke, the Library's Head of Collections & eStrategy, the first session of the Forum involved a presentation and demo by project group members to give us an overview of the new catalogue/resource discovery layer and to highlight the key functionality. Some of the initial testing plans were also outlined and Forum members have been busy with these for the past few weeks.
The idea is that Forum members will carry out 'themed' testing - that is, performing themed searches on the records already uploaded in order to detect any problem areas for further investigation. Jeremy Grayson, the Library Database Manager, comes up with weekly tasks for Forum members to try out. These have included testing the basic search functionality across all collections and feeding back initial impressions, testing pre-search filters, advanced search options and facets (for post-search filtering), examining how individual records display and what they contain, and checking if different versions of the same thing are grouped together in one search result (the jargon for this concept is FRBRization - pronounced 'fir-burr-eye-zation', if that helps!). The systems team and metadata specialists are continually working on issues as they arise and when Ex Libris visited this week to deliver back of house systems training, there was a further opportunity to raise many of the issues identified during testing. There are now over half a million records uploaded to the system and changes are taking place on an almost daily basis.
24 February 2011
8 February 2011
Welcome to the Resource Discovery Forum
We've recently purchased a new next generation library catalogue and resource discovery layer. The selected product is called Primo and it's produced by Ex Libris, a leading provider of all types of library systems (our existing digital content discovery service, Find it @ Sheffield, is powered by another Ex Libris product). So, why have we bought a new library catalogue at a time like this? Like all traditional online library catalogues, our existing Star catalogue lacks the functionality required of a modern discovery and delivery solution specifically designed to handle growing digital collections. The new (yet to be named) catalogue/resource discovery layer should present a vastly improved customer experience with a single point of access for searching all the Library's collections. As well as locally held materials, our customers will be able to search for materials in digital repositories such as White Rose Research Online, and for subscribed ebooks, ejournals and databases available from third party vendors. Searches can return article-level results, and context-sensitive facets (things like topic, date, location) plus relevance ranking can enable refinement of results post-search, helping our customers select the most appropriate resources for their needs.
The Library's project to implement the new catalogue/resource discovery layer has been running for a few months now with lots of 'behind the scenes' work going on to set up the system and get our existing data into it. The Resource Discovery Forum has been formed to work alongside the project group to provide a wider, more customer-focused perspective of some of the issues. We're a sizeable group (around thirty members), representing a broad spectrum of the Library's operations. We include customer service staff involved in frontline service delivery, systems and metadata specialists (the experts on the technical aspects of both the system and the data), librarians with experience of information literacy education and the specialist requirements of our researchers, and staff responsible for supporting our customers with additional needs.
The Resource Discovery Forum aims to get a view from every possible angle on things like interface look and feel, quality of the user experience, and quality of the data. Initially, we'll be meeting on a monthly basis to discuss these issues, and to get involved in 'hands on' tasks such as testing and training. We plan to use this blog to keep you updated with our news and progress, and we hope you enjoy following us on our journey over the coming months.
The Library's project to implement the new catalogue/resource discovery layer has been running for a few months now with lots of 'behind the scenes' work going on to set up the system and get our existing data into it. The Resource Discovery Forum has been formed to work alongside the project group to provide a wider, more customer-focused perspective of some of the issues. We're a sizeable group (around thirty members), representing a broad spectrum of the Library's operations. We include customer service staff involved in frontline service delivery, systems and metadata specialists (the experts on the technical aspects of both the system and the data), librarians with experience of information literacy education and the specialist requirements of our researchers, and staff responsible for supporting our customers with additional needs.
The Resource Discovery Forum aims to get a view from every possible angle on things like interface look and feel, quality of the user experience, and quality of the data. Initially, we'll be meeting on a monthly basis to discuss these issues, and to get involved in 'hands on' tasks such as testing and training. We plan to use this blog to keep you updated with our news and progress, and we hope you enjoy following us on our journey over the coming months.
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