2) If they put in a title, it doesn’t come up to the top.
Unless you know how to do the three clicks needed to make it a browse search, Title search in iBistro is really a keyword search on title fields. A title search with all common words may bring up thousands of titles, latest publications first unless it’s more than the limit to sort. Certain words are treated as Boolean operators unless you put them in quotes, so Not Without My Daughter brings up thousands of titles that do NOT have the word Without, the word My or the word Daughter. Of course, the list does NOT have the title wanted.
Do we explain these aberrations to the patrons? I do if it comes up, but most staff members probably didn’t even hear them in the training 6 years ago, let alone remember them now.

3) Series, especially in public libraries, seem to be horribly treated…
We’re all buying our cataloging from various outsourcing companies, so it’s no wonder it’s inconsistent. My library system transferred most of its catalogers to branches years ago, with predictable results. Does the Director care? (Different director now) Administrators spend most of their time worrying about support from our parent governments. Politicians want cheaper cataloging, not better cataloging which they wouldn’t know from a toxic waste dump.

4) Similar to above, finding out what books an author wrote and the original publication history of those books is frustrating.
My library subscribes to the NoveList database, which helps sort out these for many authors. Yeah, iBistro doesn’t help much.

5) Where’s the Sexy Vampire Hunter subject?
It takes years for a new publishing trend to be reflected in the official Library of Congress Subject Headings. Catalogers just hate anarchy, which is what the Web thrives on. Yes, our OPACs could be set up to incorporate user suggestions as Amazon does, but that would require them to be designed by public services staff who actually want to make things easier. Instead, they’re in the hands of (with many exceptions, of course) people who became catalogers in order to create an abstract, orderly universe where they’d never have to speak to a real human being.

“It’s not you, it’s them” pretty much says it all & is a wonderful reminder [for me at least].

Nicely done.

Thanks!

Mark [one of "them"]

I have frequent conversations with patrons (mostly teens) about the difference between keyword and subject.

I think you should possibly reconsider this. I am not using any special stylesheet and the fonts on the SAILS page are much smaller than the fonts on this website when both are at their default sizes for the website. Compare:

SAILS site
librarian.net

Not everyone knows how to resize fonts in their browser or has the dexterity to do so. Additionally, if they make the font size larger to make this visible for the SAILS site, then they have to make it small again to go back to other sites. The default sizes should pretty much always be medium size fonts so that people have to do a minimum of adjustment to view your site.

It seems like there should be a “persona” in designing this stuff that’s the generally internet-savvy, but not esp library-savvy person. That impatient guy who doesn’t ask for directions? :)

We finally realized that the public is going to us first, and most libraries are pointing to us, rather than right into the catalog. We never wanted to usurp our libraries connection to their patrons.

Knowing that we’re going to be going to SOPAC we held off on our public redesign, since getting a new public site for SAILS will be part of it, as well as being able to offer some of our libraries a new site as well. A few weeks ago I did a quick and dirty clean up. It used to be even more cluttered.

I’d love to be able to spend more time testing on different browsers, OS’s, etc. but my main focus is our catalog, not our public website. Soon it will be all the same!

This catalog sounds a lot like the one at my public library. And thank god, you /can/ just enter your 14-character patron number once and for all on your own home computer.

A twist on that, though: A few times I have gone to use the public computers in the library — yes, to try to find titles of readalikes and ‘next in series’ via Google because they aren’t available via the library catalog and I haven’t done my research ahead of time — and sometimes I haven’t had my library card with me. The reference librarian has made it clear that I am only allowed one “look-up”, that is, one instance of the librarian looking up my number in the library’s system and writing it down for me on a piece of paper so I can take it 5 feet away, squint at it, and try to type it correctly into the public computer interface. So far, I’ve had two “look-ups,” about 6 months apart. Next time I come in without my card and wonder what other authors I might like, I’m apparently out of luck.

I understand that librarians don’t want to spent their time looking up patrons’ numbers. That does seem wasteful. But there must be a better way to handle this. A few years ago, we could just sign our names on a list in order to use the computers, no number needed.

What I want is one of those more convenient (for me) keychain ID cards but apparently I can’t get one unless I pay $1 for it, because my library card is not up for renewal for another year. New patrons get them now when they sign up. Nice.

That said, some really basic changes like having a search box on the main page, making the fonts bigger (I’m on a mac, maybe that matters) and grouping the links so it’s obvious what is part of the catalog and what is extra SAILS stuff might go a long way to making what you have a lot more usable. Thanks for checking in.

Laurie, you probably know this, and I don’t want to lecture, but I think surveys of “what do you want the catalog to do” are very different from usability testing where you give people tasks and see what they actually do and where they have problems.

I’m not unsympathetic, having spent plenty of time in the past banging my head against a recalcitrant OPAC from the administrator’s side.