opac survey

Dave Pattern’s opac survey uncovered lots of neat info and featured lots of pretty graphs but it was really the final “comments” post that I found most enlightening and struck the greatest chord with me. In particular, those respondents questioning whether the opac (and its users obviously) needs or benefits from all those web 2.0 features. Just because Amazon (or whatever other site) has these features does that really mean the library needs them too? I’m as guilty as the next guy in terms of implementing these features and frankly, at some point I’m going to run out of physical screen real estate to keep adding them. On the one hand, I feel strongly that you can’t properly judge the demand for or usefulness of a feature without actually implementing it. And some features will be failures and that’s okay too. But we also need to be asking our users whether these features are of interest to them or just a distraction. And that’s where a survey that talks to library users rather than librarians is needed to complete the puzzle.