DeeAnn Allison

Information Portals: The Next Generation Catalog

Libraries today face an increasing challenge: to provide relevant information to diverse populations with differing needs while competing with Web search engines like Google. In 2009, a large group of libraries, including the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, joined with Innovative Interfaces as development partners to design a new type of discovery tool. The concept of information portals best supports the research and instructional needs of our communities by organizing and presenting information that incorporates licensed databases, text, multimedia, and other relevant sources. The discovery tool under examination by University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Encore integrates searches of the catalog, locally created full-text and image sources, and articles from licensed databases with navigation options that facilitate narrowing and expanding search results. This information portal development is an ongoing process with the goal of providing a tool that is as easy to use as Web search engines and that preserves the quality that library users expect. This article explores the requirements for an information portal and describes the challenges University of Nebraska-Lincoln faced when implementing Encore. Statistics from the initial implementation are presented, along with recommendations for future usability studies to evaluate where additional improvements should be made.

Measuring the Academic Impact of Libraries

University and college libraries often seek ways to demonstrate their impact for the academic community. This article reports the results from a two-year study that analyzed library use as demonstrated through checkouts and off-campus access to full-text resources against grade point averages (GPAs) of undergraduates and graduates at a large Midwestern library. The study found that undergraduates with a GPA above the mean university GPA used the library more than those with a GPA below the mean. There was a correlation between greater use of the library and increases in GPA between the two years—that is, as one grew, so did the other. The study also showed that students who checked out materials in one year returned for additional checkouts.

Chatbots in the library: is it time?

Purpose – This paper aims to describe a pilot at the University of Nebraska‐Lincoln for a chatbot that answers questions about the library and library resources.Design/methodology/approach – The chatbot was developed using a SQL database to store the question and answers using artificial intelligence mark‐up language metadata. The user interface was built using PHP, adapted from Program‐O. The open source PHP program was modified to support better display and the launching of URLs within the chatbot screen. Database content was created by “mining” library websites for information, and analyzing chat logs.Findings – The chatbot answers questions from a variety of users from around the world. It has attracted an unexpected number of social chatters, which required some additional metadata to accommodate personal chatting and to guide questions back to the intent of the project. The majority of questions are directional or factual questions that Pixel can handle. The database proved to be practical to build ...

Index Relativity and Patron Search Strategy.

This study compares searches in two different keyword indexes with similar content. Search results are dependent on the quality of the search strategy, the search engine execution, and the content the search is run against. This study examines the degree to which changing the search engine execution with only slight changes in index content would have on search results. The results indicate that search engine execution has a dramatic impact on the number of matches for most searches. Analysis also reveals that user search strategy did not change even though the way the search engine executes the search changed dramatically and new features and commands that they could use to refine their searches were added. Users appear to be ignoring search help screens and continue to do basic searches that negatively affect the number of relevant matches. Providing more features for constructing better searches will not necessarily result in better search strategy.

OAI-PMH Harvested Collections and User Engagement

ABSTRACT Discovery tools are used in libraries to bring together books, articles, and other resources. Research has focused on user and librarian evaluation of these tools, but there are few evaluations of non-book and non-article sources. Discovery tools can also include metadata for local collections harvested through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Creating these harvests can be time consuming for staff, so it is important for libraries to understand if and how patrons use these records. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries (UNL Libraries) harvests metadata from local collections into the Encore discovery tool. A study was conducted to analyze patron use of OAI-harvested records. This study analyzed usage data for harvested collections obtained from different discovery sources and referrals through Encore. Google Analytics was used to evaluate searcher behavior differences between content referred through Encore and other referrals. Although discovery through Encore did not result in high numbers of traffic, there is evidence that patrons who discover records through Encore take more time looking through records than patrons using other discovery methods. This increase in time is a measure of engagement and may be reason enough for libraries to consider adding OAI-harvested collections to their discovery tool.