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.

Testing, testing ...

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.

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.