Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Introduction and Final Report on Resource Discovery, U. Wisconsin Madison

Hello, I'm Sue Dentinger, Network Services Librarian for the Library Technology Group and University of Wisconsin Digital Collections. With Kelli Keclik, I recently co-chaired a "Resource Discovery Exploratory Task Force". We were charged with developing a vision for information resource discovery in the Libraries that supports teaching, learning and research at UW-Madison. Our goal was to better understand our patron’s and their information seeking behaviors and come up with ideas on how we can better satisfy their information and resource discovery needs.

As part of this, we undertook an online survey of our library patrons, held focus groups and listening sessions (where we got an earful!), looked at several resource discovery projects or products which might be an improvement over what we have now, used CrazyEgg software to get a start on better understanding how our patrons currently use some of our web pages, and finally we produced a report detailing our recommendations. The report and recommendations are available via: http://uwlibdiscovery.blogspot.com/2008/06/executive-summary-of-our-final-report.html

The committee has just ended, and now library management will be deciding how to deal with these recommendations. But I really appreciated the opportunity listen to our clientele and think and read a bit more about the many problems our patrons have using our licensed resources to find what they need and exploring better solutions. So I'm looking forward to this chance to interact with all of you on this topic.

1 comment:

Stephen Elfstrand said...

Very good document I'll share with my staff. We hope to release our version of VUFind for the use of our members here in MnPALS by August 15. We have a large shared library catalog with 63 libraries and the use non-use by them is strictly optional.