What should the resource discovery layer be called?

April's Resource Discovery Forum took place on Tuesday 26 April 2011 in the Information Commons. There was a good turnout, despite the session being sandwiched between two extended holiday weekends. With enough of us to form three groups (led by Andy Bussey, Library Systems Manager; Elaine Dean, Head of Service Development; and Rachel Mason, Metadata & eTechnologies Manager), we were keen to discuss the main topic of the session: what should the resource discovery layer be called? Each group reviewed some of the names other institutions have chosen for their Primo installations before coming up with some suggestions for our own. Then we discussed ideas for involving colleagues and customers in the naming process.

Comparing notes of the breakout discussions, it was clear that we agreed on the importance of branding and identity for Library systems and services. Making Library products more easily identifiable for customers was a key concern and the groups agreed that rebranding was important. Primo is the brand name of the product, but some institutions have chosen to use or include it in their own names for their resource discovery layers (such as University of Cape Town's primo.uct and University of Strathclyde's SUPrimo). There was a feeling that Primo was more of a technical term in that it would mean something to Library staff, but not that much to customers. We preferred a more descriptive name that helps customers understand what the resource discovery layer is and what it does. Examples we liked from other institutions included University of Iowa's Smart Search and Yale University's YuFind. We felt this approach was particularly important as a resource discovery layer is and does more than a traditional library catalogue (it searches remote repositories, delivers full text and provides access to a full range of Library services, for example). The group agreed that it would be good to try to reflect some of this in the name.

We also agreed that a good brand name should be memorable and concise. An acronym was a possibility as this could be descriptive, though less likely to be understood immediately by new customers. On the other hand, a strong brand quickly becomes associated with the product in the customer's mind (like our current Star catalogue). It seems there's a grain of truth in the tongue in cheek comment of one RDF member - "avoid anything that's too gimmicky and anything that's not gimmicky enough!" Interesting, informative, memorable AND concise - it's a formidable task.

So, what happens next? The project team and other colleagues will agree a shortlist of suggestions and make this available for wider consultation. This will be ongoing over the next few months and we'll keep you up to date via this blog and the usual channels.

Focus groups & the competition

The second meeting of the Resource Discovery Forum was a practical focus group session.  The aim was to generate some initial findings to help shape a test interface for customer usability testing.  Forum members were split into three groups, each hosted by one of the project team (Andy Bussey, Library Systems Manager; Antony Hawkins, Library IT Manager; and Rachel Mason, Metadata & eTechnologies Manager) and decamped to breakout rooms in the Sir Frederick Mappin Building to work through a series of questions.

Each group began with a brief discussion of the catalogue user community.  You may think a simple staff/student approach would suffice, but this doesn't account for the fact that there's more than one type of each.  Undergraduates have different needs to postgraduates who have different needs to distance learners who have different needs to placement students - and so on.  This tied in with the next topic: the most frequently carried out tasks.  Why do our customers use the catalogue?  What do they go there to do?

Next, there were questions on the look and feel of the 'out of the box' interface (our current test version).  We were asked to consider the overall visual impact (things like branding, use of white space, graphics and text) and say what we liked most (and least!).  We also thought about usability issues, such as navigation, layout and links.

Having had a chance to reflect on the 'out of the box' interface, we were ready for some competitor analysis to give us an idea of the 'market' context.  A number of leading international research focused universities have already implemented Primo.  By applying the same questions we'd asked of our own test set up to their live systems, we hoped to assess the possibilities for customisation and making the most of the available functionality.  Some of the institutions we looked at were Yale, Oxford, Aberystwyth, New South Wales and Manchester.  The idea of an implementation as a work in progress (there are a few beta labels) is an interesting Web 2.0 inspired approach (the 'perpetual beta' model allows for user-contributed development to extend beyond an early release).  But that aside, it was a useful exercise just to be able to visualise the possibilities for Sheffield.

Finally, there was time for the briefest of summaries of each group's findings.  We agreed that our customer base is diverse; that customers use the catalogue for key tasks (such as reserving an item); and that less is more - we like a Google-style clutter-free page with a highly visible main search box.  The full findings will be collated and summarised in advance of the next session and we'll have a chance to look at them in more detail then.

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.