OPAC 2.0
So like all the rest of us, I’m oohing and aahing over NCSU’s new OPAC. Which is definitely an improvement over what we’ve got. I truly, truly dig the LCC browse. Excellent, not least because it’s passive inculcation of the LCC system.
Now watch me rip on it.
Type in an author name. (“Andrew Pace” works.) Oops, did you remember to change from keyword to author search? Because if you didn’t, the catalog doesn’t realize that’s what you were doing, and the narrow-your-search sidebar won’t be the same. I can imagine that tripping up many, many an undergraduate. RedLightGreen knows when you’ve searched for an author’s name as a keyword (though it’s not at its best with this particular search either; try it). So should this.
Okay, now do the same search again, making sure that you select “Keyword in Author,” and look at that sidebar. Question one: why are authors stuck way at the bottom of the sidebar, when you’ve gone and told the machine that’s what you were looking for? Question two: why doesn’t Andrew Pace appear in the list as an author? Question three: why is the sidebar not smart enough to distinguish between human and corporate-body authorship, when even MARC is? (Does your typical patron even think of corporate bodies as authors? Why even show them, and for heaven’s sake, why mix them up with human bodies both here and in the results display?)
The answer to some of the above questions is that Andrew Pace wasn’t in the “author” MARC field—he was in one of the MARC 700 fields, or in the table of contents, or something. The problem is that a patron can look at some of these records and not understand why they came up in the search. That’s bad. Whenever possible, this should be made obvious; if you have to pull up 7xx fields as “Contributor” or whatever, do it (and big brownie points to your cataloguers if you can distinguish editors from translators from contributors et cetera). Or do what Pandora does, and offer an AJAXy “Why am I seeing this record?” gizmo.
All authors in results lists should be links, leading to catalog search results for that author. If I can do it for DSpace (and I just did, this morning; patch imminent), Endeca can do it. That’s basic Ranganathan-style “save the time of the reader” usability. That’s “More Like This” functionality, which users love.
“Subject: Topic”? Gah, don’t do that. Jargon is so Library 1.0. Sure, we know that MARC has different kinds of subjects; the patron doesn’t know and shouldn’t have to wonder. This should be “Subject” or “Topic,” and “Subject: Genre” should just be… well, actually, I don’t like “Genre,” so let’s try “Publication Type.” And while you’re at it, change “Browse by:” at the top of the results page to “Browse results by:” lest students think they’re browsing the entire catalog.
Instead of “Send search to:” I would recommend “Widen search to:” The patron doesn’t care that the underlying catalogue is shooting a query elsewhere; the patron cares that he can get more results this way. “Send” doesn’t indicate that, and additionally has an email-ish connotation that’s just wrong in this context.
Bottom line: get ye to an information architect, NCSU, to get your labels properly labeled. (Although I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they’re still doing usability testing. If so, good.)
I notice that this interface is tuned for cutting down on results glut. It’s not good at all for pearl-growing or broadening searches. This is a thorny information-architecture problem—patrons need to be able to narrow and broaden and go off in different directions—and I’m not at all sure how best to solve it… but I do want to see it solved. I noticed in my own playing-around that I occasionally clicked on a sidebar link expecting it to search the whole catalog for what I clicked on. Oops.
Okay, now for the results themselves. I like the stacks directions. I do not like that they’re separated from the library name, which is the other half of the same piece of information (“where’s the book?”) from the point of view of the patron. This should be an easy fix, and ought to have been an obvious one.
If the format is “eBook,” the word “eBook” should link to the ebook. Yes, I know MARC doesn’t work that way. That’s just too darn bad; this “Online:” line is completely unnecessary and should be abolished with extreme prejudice.
Lest someone think I hate the effort, here are some things I delight in:
- Combo box for search-options much reduced. I still don’t like combo boxen, but NCSU sensibly reduced the options to the bare useful minimum.
- Title-search passes the I can’t remember the name of my own darn book test. (Nota bene, though: I first typed in “columbia electronic publishing” and got nothing. eBay has a neat trick where they retry a low- or no-results search with different term combinations. I’d like to see that here.)
- Last-name-first, first-name-last, doesn’t matter. Article in title, no article in title, doesn’t matter. Yay!
- No intermediate-results lists. I asked for books by Andrew Pace, that’s what I got—I didn’t get a list of authors with Andrew Pace’s name in the middle. (DySirnixsi, I am so glaring at you right now.)
- Sidebar sensibly goes away when there’s not enough information to put in it.
Overall, this is a marvelous advance over the current state of the OPAC. Most of what I’ve suggested are little tuning tweaks, which of course means that the interesting changes are the other ones. More OPACs like this, please!