Usable OPACs
Don’t listen to me; I talk the talk, but I’m not a real usability expert.
These guys got a real usability expert to go over their library interfaces, OPAC included. What they found out is fascinating, and I want to see the results when they’re done.
One thing I especially liked was the expert’s obvious imperative to reduce the clicky-clicky. IRs in general and DSpace in particular is really horrible about the clicky-clicky; it’s impossible to find anything in fewer than four or five clicks, even—especially!—if you know it’s there. Coming in from an external search interface is even worse, because you get presented the same set of metadata twice, once from the search aggregator and once from the repository.
Clue: Patrons don’t want the metadata. They want the item. Get them to the item as quickly as may be.
Now, there are implementation issues here that I won’t go into… but suffice it to say the problem can to some extent be ameliorated, and if I end up running a DSpace install, I’m certainly going to try.