Progress Report from the D & D Council

When we began our work, we all assumed that our first order of business would be the OPAC, given its capacity to turn some of the best metadata in the book industry into the most boring and inadequate representations of our collections possible. The information that the current OPAC provides our patrons is only slightly better than instructions from IKEA.

We discussed the OPAC's good and bad points at our first meeting, which included these observations: The current Voyager OPAC is unforgiving about spelling. It doesn't come back with, "Did you mean..." or even place you in a list of similarly spelled words so you can browse its indexing (though it does do so for correctly entered author searches.) Nope, it tells you, "Your search retrieved no records!" (The exclamation point provides a note of lightness, of "Hey, too bad you can't spell, but we're still excited!")

It does not provide facets, or breakdowns of the subjects your search generates so you can explore broader or more narrow aspects of your search. It's brutal about author names, and still requires us to type in last name first, first name last, etc. even as most web search engines return results regardless how the name is typed in. It does not make suggestions ("If you're looking for books about X subject, you might take a look at ...")

It doesn't allow patrons to write reviews or notes about titles they read. Searches fail if an article is typed in a title search (entering "The sun also rises" gets you back to that excited declaration that "Your search retrieved no records!" while Mr. Hemingway's book hides stealthily in the database. On the plus side, if you spell correctly, leave off definite and indefinite articles, follow last name rules, etc. you can determine whether our library owns a book.

These problems will be a major focus of the D&D Council. However, another issue seized our attention at the start, and we're making good progress toward solving it: namely, improving the performance of our link resolver (Linksource), providing meaningful and consistent icons and/or language within our multiple databases to inform patrons when full-text is available, or directing them to alternate search possibilities, and generally doing our best to rein in the nonconformity of our databases to any standards.

Our goal is to, as much as possible, create an environment where patrons will be able to instantly recognize a uniform set of icons leading people to full text articles or to other services the library can provide to obtain an article. We also realized that we lack a form on our web site that links directly to Linksource so that people can immediately determine if the libraries offer the full text of an article they have a citation for.

Another of our goals is to lead patrons to print (hard copy) journals via Linksource, if we can make that work, so patrons can easily see their choices of print or online access. These tasks will involve working closely with members of Information and Instruction who oversee the administrative functioning of our databases. Members of the D&D Council have to first complete their research before taking that step, but you should start to see some changes happening relatively soon when you're searching for articles.

--by Peter Spitzform, for the D&D Council