1. How Many Dimensions of Compatibility? Discovering What's Right for Your Users University of Houston Libraries Discovery Day Camp June 10, 2011 Marliese Thomas Auburn University Libraries

2. x 3. When investigating discovery products....

How many dimensions of compatibility do you really need? 4. Are you overly narrow or overly broad in your search criteria? 5. Are we shifting away from the idea of marrying our product decisions?

6. Everlasting love....

Traditional ILS purchases were long-term investments

• Change was a major undertaking 7. Staff, $$$, users

Does that reasoning still apply?

• Buying a car vs. a laptop

8. or head in the clouds?

Hosted solutions allow for lower up-front costs 9. Flexibility in required staffing 10. Be more reactive to changing technology landscape 11. Possible short-term solution

• How short is short-term?

12. So, what next? Form a committee? Photo by hlehto. http://www.flickr.com/photos/hlehto/532099446/ 13. Well, that depends...

On your product

• Open source and customized solutions require more local staff time

On your staff

• Who is responsible for the project? 14. What skills do you have among your people?

On your local culture and geography

• Representation from other departments, branches? 15. Identify needed skills, then desired insights

16. Gathering feedback

From users

• Good old focus groups 17. Online surveys 18. Student Advisory Council

Technical capabilities

• Server speed and strength 19. Data management, statistics

It never really ends... 20. Photo by Night-thing. http://www.flickr.com/photos/80327698@N00/4998726133/

21. Don't forget about your employee users, too!

Engage them in the process

• Bug blitzes - prizes! 22. Committee work

Help them understand the what and the why

• Analogies, examples The Cookie Analogy 23. Forums, other communication

Know when to refer questions to a higher authority

24. Managing the flow of information 25. What information?

Documentation (I can't stress this enough) 26. Regular communication with the higher ups 27. Comments from all directions

• Feedback forms 28. Unsolicited opinions 29. Ongoing development work 30. Error reports

31. We tried anything and everything

Wikis 32. Blogs 33. Email groups 34. Listservs 35. Shared documents (GoogleDocs) 36. Online forms 37. Bugzilla and Mercurial (for the programmers)

38. Redmine.... just right. For us.

Open source ticket tracking software 39. Tickets are created from emailed comments 40. It can also store committee documents and blog postings 41. Managed by our head programmer no more bi-weekly roundtable meetings! 42. Note: This was a perfect way for the Auburn University Libraries group to transition the VuFind development project into maintenance mode.

43. Development is done,and you're ready to releasethe new search box. 44. But can we provide too much customization?

Argument A: Integrating all our resources into one interface doesn't help the student actively know what resource he/she is using. It's overwhelming 45. Argument B: If we pre-narrow the field too much, will students realize their search results are essentially being edited before they are even displayed?

46. Picky, picky, picky

Websites like Google and Facebook use cookie-based and other information to 'personalize' your experience 47. Results the algorithms predict you won't find appealing are removed from the results list or news feed

• Great for advertisements 48. Not so great for undergraduate research

49. Every technology has an interface... a place where you end and the technology begins. And when the technology's job is to show you the world, it ends up sitting between you and reality, like a camera lens. Eli Pariser,The Filter Bubble 50. You have to see where you're going to know if you're facing the right direction. 51. Marliese Thomas Librarian for Special Collections Technology Auburn University Libraries [email_address] 334.844.8171 Twitter @msthomas Slideshare: marliesethomas