Just noticed an interesting OPAC survey mentioned in the latest edition of CILIPs Library + Information Gazette which I thought would be worth sharing here.

Following on from Dave Pattern’s nationwide survey to see what we think of our OPACs in 2007 (see more details of the survey and its results on his Self-plagiarism is style blog), Bowker have launched a new survey to discover what librarians currently think about their OPACs to see whether things have improved at all.

Taken from the survey:

In October 2007, David Pattern from the University of Huddersfield published the results of his OPAC satisfaction survey and he revealed some interesting facts about the state of OPACs in the UK and the level of satisfaction, or dis-satisfaction more accurately, of the librarians who use them.

Fifteen months on from the publication of these results, Bowker have teamed up with David to survey the market again to see if there has been any improvement or change in attitude to the humble OPAC. With the increase of software solutions and content enrichment options available for OPACs, it’s time to take stock of the market once more and find out whether the nation’s OPACs have improved.

There’s a good reason to complete the survey too – for every 100 responses, Bowker will donate a gift of schoolbooks to deprived children via the Oxfam Unwrapped scheme.

Tweet this

It’s always come as a surprise to me just how much we (as librarians) rely on the OPAC. It may be different at other establishments but I know here we use it for many of our enquiries (if you ignore the silly number of enquiries we get about room bookings!) and also for staff tasks such as checking reading lists, checking stock levels before weeding, etc etc.

You’d think with so much of our work relying on the tool, that tool must be amazing. Sadly not. To coin a phrase used by Davey P at Huddersfield University, our OPAC sucks and his survey results show we’re definitely not alone.

Fortunately things are looking up here. We are currently in the massively time consuming process of looking for another library management system. One of the stages is to examine what us, and more importantly our users need from an OPAC. I’m going to be involved in the OPAC project and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m hopeful we can gain feedback from users and potentially integrate features like book covers, ratings, similar item suggestions, and spelling suggestions (boo.

Tweet this